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info@reason.org (Reason Foundation)http://www.pjdoland.com/chai/?v=0.1Virginia's Big-Government Conservatismhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/virginias-big-government-conservati
<p>If there's one thing Virginia's leading Republicans agree on, it's government regulation. They're against it.</p>
<p>"Keep taxes and regulation and litigation low," Gov. Bob McDonnell said in 2009 when he was asked how to make Virginia business-friendly. It's a tune he sings often. "Low taxes, regulation, (and) litigation," he answered when FOX's Neil Cavuto asked how Virginia encourages hiring. "It is the free enterprise system and the private sector that create wealth and opportunity, not government. And that's a fundamental difference."</p>
<p>Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling agrees. As his campaign website boasts, Bolling "consistently promoted lower taxes, less regulation and a smaller, more efficient state government." Therefore, Bolling "sponsored legislation requiring an economic impact study before new regulations could be imposed on small businesses in Virginia." Under the section headed "Creating Jobs," Bolling stresses the importance of "eliminating overly burdensome regulations."</p>
<p>The same goes for state Sen. Ryan McDougle. When he was sworn in for his second term in 2008, McDougle promised, among other things, to ensure that "you are not burdened with intrusive new government regulations."</p>
<p>But a commitment to the principle of laissez-faire evidently goes only so far. Because this year McDougle sponsored the legislation requiring the Department of Health to write tough new regulations for abortion clinics. The board has now done so, and will vote on them next Thursday.</p>
<p>McDonnell signed McDougle's measure into law&mdash;apparently without a qualm and perhaps even enthusiastically. Bolling cast the tie-breaking state Senate vote that enabled him do so.</p>
<p>In their defense, the trio might say they favor low government regulation&mdash;not zero regulation. But that would be a pretty lame dodge.</p>
<p>For one thing, abortion clinics were not regulation-free zones before McDougle's bill came along. They were governed like dentists and other outpatient surgical offices. The new regulations require them to meet architectural, staffing, and other standards that apply to full-service hospitals.</p>
<p>Nor have supporters of the legislation presented evidence that Virginia's existing regulations were inadequate. Pro-life advocates offer a lot of fire-and-brimstone rhetoric about fear-mongering by a secretive, politically protected industry. They don't offer any hard facts to show that Virginia's abortion clinics are unsafe. Ninety-six percent of the abortions in Virginia occur in the first trimester, and 99.5 percent of first-trimester abortions require no follow-up medical care.</p>
<p>Pro-choice advocates are right: The new rules are nothing but a thinly disguised attempt to hamper and incommode abortion clinics by people who consider abortion wrong.</p>
<p>Not, mind you, that liberals have any standing to object. Because that is precisely what progressives have tried to do to industries of which they disapprove&mdash;payday lenders, for example.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is an article of progressive faith that private enterprise is motivated by greed and therefore not to be trusted. The firm hand of government must check its rapacious indifference to the public good, which often manifests itself in a tendency to exploit the most vulnerable members of our national community&mdash;minorities and women in particular.</p>
<p>Well. African-American women happen to have abortions at rates far higher than white women, and pro-life groups have noted with some asperity the less-than-progressive views of the supposed untermenschen held by Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger. What's more, abortion is good money&mdash;Planned Parenthood alone rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars from the procedure.</p>
<p>Put all that together and you get: poor black women disproportionately paying an organization founded by a eugenicist to kill their children in utero. It almost sounds like a Klansman's dream. It certainly sounds like something government should keep a watchful eye on, from a progressive perspective.</p>
<p>Yet now that Virginia is poised to do so, progressives are sounding like honor students from the Murray Rothbard School of Austrian Economics: The government is nothing but a bunch of gangsters, imposing unnecessary costs that are not backed up by sound science, that threaten to shut down businesses, and that interfere with people's personal decisions. Why, the Board of Health even wants regulators to make unannounced inspections! The horror.<br /> Unfortunately for conservatives, the lack of principled consistency on the left does not absolve them of their own double standard.</p>
<p>Earlier this year one of the major players in the debate took note of the Heritage Foundation's annual Index of Economic Freedom, on which America had slipped to ninth place. "It's ironic that while the rest of the world is moving toward economic freedom," the group complained, the U.S. "has retreated from liberty. &hellip;We now live in a period where big government &hellip;threatens our liberty with ever-increasing control over our decisions."</p>
<p>That lament appeared on the blog of the Family Foundation&mdash;the chief cheerleader for Virginia's new clinic rules.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/sep/06/tdopin02-hinkle-republicans-hate-regulation-except-ar-1287196/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. <br /></em></p>1012195@http://www.reason.orgTue, 06 Sep 2011 16:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )State of the Unionhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/state-of-the-union
<p>President Obama's approval rating of the American public has fallen to an all-time low, according to a new Gallup survey of White House residents and employees.</p>
<p>Fewer than one in 10 Americans earned the president's favor, according to the president. That is down sharply from six in 10&mdash;the percentage of Americans Obama approved of shortly after his election in November 2008, and the lowest level yet for his administration.</p>
<p>"They're not doing a very good job, frankly," said the president. "Most of them, I mean. Some are. But not many."<br /> Obama's job approval for how Americans are performing has fallen in every category, from the economy to health care and the environment.</p>
<p>Americans get their highest marks for their handling of national security and emergency preparedness. The killing of Osama bin Laden marked a rare bright spot for the public, and their support for the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya showed most people have a strong grasp of foreign policy, the survey of Oval Officeholders showed.</p>
<p>Americans also have handled the recent earthquake on the East Coast and Hurricane Irene well, with more than two-thirds of them taking the disasters in stride, according to officials inside the White House.</p>
<p>But otherwise, the government feels the public is falling down on the job. The administration strongly approves of only 9 percent of Americans, while 47 percent are strongly disapproved of. Another 28 percent are somewhat disapproved of, and the White House somewhat approves of the remaining 16 percent.</p>
<p>"What these numbers show, I think, is that the president has become increasingly disillusioned with the American public," said Trevor Gopnik, a professor of political science at Georgetown University.</p>
<p>"He's completely disgusted," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. "Which shouldn't be all that surprising, given the state of the economy, the high unemployment rate, and the fact that most Americans are, let's face it, fat lazy slobs. Go to a mall and look around if you don't believe me," said Carney.</p>
<p>The summer's debt-ceiling stalemate has contributed to the president's sour mood, observers say, as did the decision to cut short his vacation a day early even though many Americans are still enjoying theirs.</p>
<p>The survey of the West Wing also found:</p>
<ul>
<li>Officials are still deeply concerned about high levels of household debt. While delinquency and foreclosure rates have fallen in recent months, per-capita debt load remains too high, holding back the recovery and stoking fears of a double-dip recession that would be blamed on Obama.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Americans eat too much and don't get enough exercise, says First Lady Michelle Obama &mdash; a view echoed by her husband's administration. "Today, we outline a vision for the nation that requires parents, neighborhoods, the medical community, employers, schools and individuals to take a coordinated and comprehensive approach to combating overweight and obesity," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last year.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The public doesn't pay enough taxes. There are "things we need to pay for as a country," the president stressed.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Americans also are lousy consumers, according a cross-tabulation of responses by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who said recent regulation of light bulbs was a good thing because "we are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money."</li>
</ul>
<p>Other results from the poll indicate that Americans are incapable of providing for their own medical care, insist on buying cars that are safe and comfortable instead of cars that get the highest gasoline mileage, smoke too much, harbor too many of the wrong attitudes, fail to volunteer at sufficient rates, are too greedy, do not separate their recyclables enough, and continue to cling to guns and religion despite being lectured to by their betters about the importance of doing otherwise.</p>
<p>Some analysts tried to find a silver lining in all those clouds.</p>
<p>Republican pollster Mark Nofziger noted that the U.S. is still 14 months away from the next presidential election. The critical period for the American people will not begin until after Labor Day, he said, when politicians begin competing in earnest to determine who will oversee them.</p>
<p>But Lyman Worrel, a historian of American politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, warned against too much optimism. "There's always a honeymoon period after any election," he cautioned. "But honeymoons don't last forever. I expect that the next president&mdash;whoever he or she is&mdash;will be disappointed by the American people, just like Obama has."</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/sep/02/tdopin02-hinkle-presidents-approval-of-the-america-ar-1279976/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch</em>.</p>1012190@http://www.reason.orgFri, 02 Sep 2011 16:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )A Laughing Matterhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/a-laughing-matter
<p>If you're looking for laughs, the nation's capital probably isn't the place to start your search. But you can still find reasons for levity if you try. Take immigration.</p>
<p>About a year ago, elite opinion was choking on its own rage over Arizona's harsh new immigration law. Much of that law simply recapitulated federal policy at the state level, but certain parts went beyond federal statute.</p>
<p>Well. This was something up with which one must not put. And one did not. The Obama administration swiftly filed suit in order to defend the principle of federal supremacy. States, said the administration, had no business deviating from federal policy on immigration, which was a federal matter best left to the federal government, on account of its being a federal deal and all.</p>
<p>Federal judge Susan Bolton agreed and swiftly issued an injunction.</p>
<p><em>The New York Times</em> pronounced itself pleased. Bolton's "clear and well-reasoned arguments," it wrote, affirmed "the federal government's final authority over immigration enforcement."</p>
<p>Whew! Another constitutional crisis averted.</p>
<p>Now, though, things are looking a mite different. The Obama administration's pursuit of illegal aliens through the Secure Communities program has alarmed good progressives everywhere. Under Secure Communities, the FBI forwards the fingerprints it receives from local law-enforcement agencies to federal immigration authorities. The program has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens.</p>
<p>The program's critics say it has deported too many small-time offenders&mdash;and even non-offenders, such as victims of domestic violence. Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York have stopped cooperating. Legislators and interest groups want California Gov. Jerry Brown to end that state's compliance, too.</p>
<p>In response, the Obama administration has filed a lawsuit in a friendly venue before a judge who is guaranteed to insist that the wayward states knuckle under.</p>
<p>Ha ha! Of course it hasn't.</p>
<p>Rather, the administration has pointed out that the program does not need state consent to go forward. It will continue to expand the program. At the same time, though, it has begun holding hearings around the country so opponents can air their concerns. And last week the Obama administration announced that merely being in the U.S. illegally would no longer be sufficient cause for deportation&mdash;you'll have to break some laws that really matter.</p>
<p>That hasty retreat probably will not satisfy the nation's newspaper of record, though. <em>The New York Times</em> has expressed its displeasure that the administration will not only "stick with Secure Communities . . . but force it down the throats of state and local leaders. . . . No one can opt out. It's non-negotiable."</p>
<p>Yikes! Having the federal government order people around without their consent like that is just terrible, is it not? It sure is! Unless it's forcing them to buy health insurance. Then, you know, it's social justice. You'd think a newspaper that had cheered Judge Bolton for rejecting "the Arizona way: an incoherent immigration system" would be delighted by the administration's assertion of the federal government's final authority over immigration policy. You'd think that&mdash;if you had never read the <em>Times</em> before.</p>
<p>It's the same thing over on the other coast. Last year, the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> was denouncing "Arizona's Overreach": The state's "attempt to crack down on companies that hire illegal immigrants encroaches on federal authority," it lamented. But now it says that "if the governor [of California] agrees to pull out" of Secure Communities&mdash;i.e., if he tries to secede from federal immigration coherence&mdash;that "would be fine with us."</p>
<p>Neither the Obama administration nor its hod-carriers in the press care one whit about federal supremacy. They trot out the argument when it's convenient and stuff it under the mattress when it's not. Liberals play this sort of game all the time.</p>
<p>But then, so do conservatives. They rail against ObamaCare's requirement that you have proof of health insurance. Yet many of them defended an Arizona statute requiring residents to carry their papers with them at all times in case a government agent wanted to see them.</p>
<p>Indeed, the conservative movement is filled with people who praise the virtues of free-market economics in one breath&mdash;and, in the next, denounce the free movement of labor across arbitrary political borders.</p>
<p>One minute conservatives are organizing Lemonade Freedom Day to protest recent incidents in which heavy-handed bureaucrats have shut down children's lemonade stands for operating without proper permits. The next, they're cheering on the federal e-Verify program, which provides "instant verification of work authorization."</p>
<p>If you're looking for laughs, the nation's capital probably isn't the place to start your search. The rest of the country, though&mdash;that's fair game.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/aug/26/tdopin02-hinkle-on-immigration-left-and-right-are--ar-1264227/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.</em></p>1012114@http://www.reason.orgFri, 26 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Serve and Protecthttp://www.reason.org/news/show/serve-and-protect
<p>The front page of last Tuesday's <em>Richmond Times-Dispatch</em> carried a startling photo: Richmond police officers taking a suspect into custody. What was startling was the display of force. The officers, accompanied by a robot and decked out in full riot gear with shield and combat helmets, could have been mistaken for American soldiers on patrol in Iraq. Yet they were going up against a single man&mdash;and they were not even sure was armed.</p>
<p>Regrettably, this is not a new development. In recent years police forces across the country have become increasingly militarized.</p>
<p>To a small degree, that trend represents a rational response in an arms race against the criminal element's escalating firepower. But more of it has to do with the lavishing of federal Homeland Security funds on local law-enforcement agencies. Local departments have used the money to buy themselves all kinds of fancy toys&mdash;from the Segways bought for the bomb squad in Santa Clara, Calif. several years ago to the Lenco BearCat G3 bought last year by the sheriff's department in Warren County, Va.</p>
<p>The BearCat G3 is an 8-ton armored personnel carrier. Its half-inch steel plating and 2.5-inch window glass can stop a .50-caliber round. Its sensors can detect chemical, biological, and radiological threats. "It's big enough to go through a house if it had to," says the department's Roger Vorous. Warren County bought the quarter-million-dollar vehicle with a Homeland Security grant.</p>
<p>"We're in a very dangerous business," Sheriff Daniel McEathron told the <em>Northern Virginia Daily</em> last year. "We're not interested in leveling the playing field. We're interested in having the high ground."</p>
<p>He's got a point: Police officers should not have to bring a knife to a gunfight. On the other hand, Warren County, which boasts that its "small-town charm" makes it "an excellent place to raise a family," has a population of fewer than 40,000. It averages about one homicide every three years. Insurgents have not detonated a roadside bomb in Warren County since&mdash;well, never. The need for an armored assault vehicle would seem scant.</p>
<p>But Warren County is not alone. McEathron says it is only one of several Virginia localities that have BearCats or similar vehicles now. Others include Roanoke and Stafford&mdash;whose sheriff, Charles Jett, said that if he had had his druthers, the money would have been used for patrol cars. "The priorities under Homeland Security are different," he said last March.</p>
<p>Still, it would be a mistake to lay blame for the militarization of the police entirely at the feet of the federal government's homeland-security endeavors. In "Overkill," a 2006 paper for the Cato Institute, Radley Balko traces the rise of paramilitary policing to the 1980s and the war on drugs. One of the earliest developments was the Military Cooperation With Law Enforcement Act, whose purpose was to let the military lend a hand in drug interdiction.</p>
<p>In the three decades since, the trend has only spread. In 1994, Congress authorized the re-use of military equipment by local law-enforcement agencies. In the following three years alone, the Pentagon provided local constabularies with 3,800 M-16s, 2,184 M-14s, and (yes) 73 grenade launchers.</p>
<p>Police officers might respond that they are simply trying to keep up with the bad guys. Maybe&mdash;although criminals in the U.S. are not known for driving tanks. That argument also does not explain the increase in no-knock raids, complete with battering rams and flash-bang grenades&mdash;or the stories about innocent people gunned down in such raids when informants give cops the wrong address. Three thousand no-knock raids took place in 1981. In 2005, police departments across the country carried out more than 50,000.</p>
<p>At this point a reasonable person might ask: What, exactly, is wrong with the paramilitary approach? After all: The police are on the side of law and order; they serve and protect law-abiding citizens. If you aren't breaking the law, then you have nothing to fear.</p>
<p>Yes, but: The paramilitary approach to law enforcement flies in the face of the idea that the police and the citizens are on the same side. Officer Friendly, strolling the block in a blue uniform and playing a paradiddle with his baton on a white picket fence, looks like he is ready to help carry groceries for the little old lady who lives on the corner. A cop in combat gear with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder looks like he is ready to go to war. In war, there is no presumption of innocence&mdash;and the opposing side is not a fellow citizen with constitutional rights. He is the enemy.</p>
<p>In prepared statements, police departments may speak of dedicated professionals who desire only to serve and protect. But in their riot gear and armored vehicles they look more like an occupying force, intending to conquer and command. That might be good tactics. It is not good government.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is s columnist at the Richmond Times Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/aug/23/tdopin02-hinkle-serve-and-protect-or-command-and-c-ar-1254996/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.</em></p>1012097@http://www.reason.orgTue, 23 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Airport Security vs. The Constitutionhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/airport-security-vs-the-constitutio
<p>You wouldn't think Aaron Tobey and Donald Rumsfeld have much in common. Tobey is the guy who stripped down to his shorts at the Richmond, Virginia airport last December. Rumsfeld is the former Defense Secretary under George W. Bush. Tobey, who was protesting the invasive airport screening practices that have outraged a good portion of the traveling public, is a stickler for constitutional rights. Rumsfeld? Not so much.</p>
<p>The two of them, however, are united by a common case: <em>Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents</em>. The other day a federal appeals court said two Americans who claimed to have been tortured by U.S. armed forces in Iraq can sue Rumsfeld for violating their constitutional rights. The court relied on the <em>Bivens</em> precedent. <em>Bivens</em> just happens to be the hook Tobey is hanging his hat on in his lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole.</p>
<p>Basically, the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in <em>Bivens</em> says you can seek monetary damages for the violation of your constitutional rights. That's what Tobey is doing, with the help of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute.<br /> To paraphrase Kevin Bacon in <em>A Few Good Men</em>: These are the facts of the case, and they are almost entirely undisputed:</p>
<p>On Dec. 30 last year, Tobey was in pre-flight screening when he was directed toward one of those special imaging machines that can see through clothing. Tobey paused to strip off his T-shirt and sweatpants. On his torso he had written: "Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated."</p>
<p>A Transportation Security Officer told Tobey he did not need to disrobe. Tobey said he wanted to in order to express his views. At that point, the TSO radioed for assistance. Two Richmond police officers arrived, cuffed Tobey, and hauled him away. Tobey isn't the only person who has gone through screening in his underclothes&mdash;but he is the only one who did it quoting the Constitution, and he is the only one who has been arrested for it.</p>
<p>He spent the next 90 minutes in handcuffs while police officers and FBI terrorism task-force agents questioned him, berated him, and threatened to tell on him by calling administrators at his university. They threw some of his personal belongings in the trash&mdash;his toothbrush and highlighter would be considered contraband in jail, they explained. Finally they issued him a summons for disorderly conduct before releasing him to catch his flight.</p>
<p>In court a few days later, prosecutors dropped the charge, recognizing that Tobey's peacefully taking off his T-shirt and sweats did not rise to the level of disorderly conduct. (Virginia law says such conduct must have a tendency to cause violence.) Now Tobey is suing over violation of his First, Fourth, Fifth, and 14th Amendment rights. Along the way he has picked up some notable supporters: the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, and civil-liberties champion Nat Hentoff.</p>
<p>Tobey claims his arrest was unjustified and unconstitutional, and the blame for it falls in part on Napolitano and Pistole, who put in place the policies that permitted it. The federal government naturally says otherwise. First, it says Tobey "disobeyed a command" to proceed through the scanner. That is questionable; Tobey claims he did as he was told.</p>
<p>The feds also say three other things: (a) The extent to which the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause to detain someone in Tobey's situation is a "novel question." Nevertheless, (b) nobody violated Tobey's rights, and (c) even if they did, Napolitano and Pistole are immune anyway.</p>
<p>For all those reasons, say the feds, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson should dismiss Tobey's lawsuit.</p>
<p>If the name sounds familiar, that's because it is. Hudson is the first judge to have ruled against ObamaCare's individual mandate&mdash;the provision that says Washington not only can tax your income but tell you how to spend what's left by forcing you to enter into a contract with a private insurance company. Hudson struck down the mandate Dec. 13, 2010&mdash;just two weeks and change before Tobey made his shirtless statement at RIC.</p>
<p>Hudson said he would rule on whether Tobey's suit can proceed within two weeks. That was last week. So the decision in the Rumsfeld case could not come at a better time. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Rumsfeld enjoys no immunity: "Plaintiffs [Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel] have alleged sufficient facts to show that Secretary Rumsfeld personally established the relevant policies that caused the alleged violations of their constitutional rights during detention."</p>
<p>As in Tobey's case, the federal government has argued that Rumsfeld enjoys immunity. The 7th Circuit says: No, he doesn't. That doesn't mean it has ruled in the plaintiffs' favor or found Rumsfeld personally culpable for the torture they claim to have endured. It merely means the case can go forward&mdash;just as it ought to.</p>
<p>Americans have cheered when foreign dictators in Romania, Egypt, and elsewhere have been made to answer for grinding citizens under their boots. It would be curious indeed if American officials were harder to hold accountable. Vance and Ertel will get their day in court. So should Aaron Tobey.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/aug/19/tdopin02-aaron-tobey-deserves-his-day-in-court-ar-1247925/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1012085@http://www.reason.orgFri, 19 Aug 2011 16:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )The Clock Is Tickinghttp://www.reason.org/news/show/the-clock-is-ticking
<p>"It's time for leadership, not petty partisan politics," declares Courtney Lynch, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia. She raises an interesting point, albeit unintentionally: When is it time for petty partisan politics rather than leadership? If now is not a good time, when would be?</p>
<p>Not last January, that's for sure. Back then, President Obama gave a speech outlining his plan to prevent terrorism. "Now is not a time for partisanship," he declared. "It's a time for citizenship."</p>
<p>Never let it be said the president does not know what it is the time for, and what it is not the time for. In September 2008, he told the Democratic National Convention that "now is not the time for small plans." The following January, he observed that while there was a time for profits and bonuses on Wall Street, "now is not the time." In mid-July this year, he warned Republicans: "Now is not the time to play games."</p>
<p>On the other hand, during the debate over health care last March, Obama noted that there were "plenty of folks in Washington who've ... argued now is not the time for reform. ... My question to them is: When is the right time? If not now, when?" He's a sharp one, that Obama!</p>
<p>Yet despite the president's skill at time-telling, some people still think he needs help. The Illinois GOP, for instance: "The chairman of Illinois' Republican Party contends this is not an appropriate time for President Obama to hold a Chicago fundraiser," news stories reported the other day.</p>
<p>Not long before, Matthew Norman, a columnist for the London <em>Telegraph</em>, suggested Obama needed to man up. "Now Is Not the Time for a Pacifist President," he wrote.</p>
<p>Norman is not alone. In June, erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty told the Council on Foreign Relations that "now is not the time to retreat from freedom's rise." How about in, like, half an hour?</p>
<p>Who else knows what time it is? House Speaker John Boehner certainly does. In January of last year, Boehner said it was not the time to debate "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." A month later, a Boehner spokesman wondered why Obama "thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation."</p>
<p>After Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts, Boehner tweeted that with Nancy Pelosi determined to push health-care reform, "[now is] not the time to give up." A couple of weeks ago, Boehner declared that "now is not the time to increase taxes in any way."</p>
<p>Virginia's Eric Cantor agreed: "I insist again that now is not the time for us to be considering tax hikes," he said. Last March, Cantor told the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee that "now is not the time to be picking fights with Israel."</p>
<p>Just to be clear, that means now is the time for neither a pacifist president, nor one who picks fights&mdash;nor one who retreats from freedom's rise. Talk about having to walk a fine line.</p>
<p>What else is it not the time for? A carbon tax (<em>Sydney Morning Herald</em>), judging Tiger Woods (Jason Whitlock, Fox Sports), cutting critical government programs (Richard Cizek, <em>The Hill</em>), Phillies Fans acting like insufferable jerks (NBC Philadelphia) or energy-starved India to increase nuclear dependency (<em>The Guardian</em>).</p>
<p>It's also not the time for cities to aim lower (Sam Newburg, Joe-Urban.com), fiscal restraint (<em>Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</em>), a voter-ID bill (South Carolina state Sen. Yancey McGill), a new Mideast peace plan (Rahm Emanuel), greed in the NFL (<em>Honolulu Star-Advertiser</em>), a war on Libya (Florida Rep. Chris Gibson), or for Congress to oppose creating jobs in Montana (Montana Sen. John Tester).</p>
<p>No wonder nobody ever seems to get anything done. It's never the right time for anything!</p>
<p>The now-is-not-the-time meme is a variation of the straw-man argument, in which you state a position nobody actually endorses and then knock it down. The president loves that trick. "There are those who suggest that nothing government can do will make a difference," he has said&mdash;along with "there are those who would continue and intensify this failed status quo," "there are those who would perpetuate every form of intolerance," "there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science" and many more. Yet he never actually says who the "who" in There-Are-Those-Who are.</p>
<p>Unlike There-Are-Those-Who-Say, Now-Is-Not-the-Time may reflect the other side's actual position. After all, there are (in fact) those who say taxes should be raised, gays should serve in the military, and so on. Rather than confront such an argument head on, the pols invoking Now-Is-Not-the-Time try to dodge the merits of the question by implying the issue might be worth exploring&mdash;someday.</p>
<p>But just try to set up a date.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/aug/16/tdopin02-what-time-is-it-and-what-time-is-it-not-ar-1240467/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1012069@http://www.reason.orgTue, 16 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )The Riot Acthttp://www.reason.org/news/show/the-riot-act
<p>"This is the uprising of the working class," said a London anarchist taking a momentary break from smashing things last Monday. "We're redistributing the wealth." Said another, "[We're showing] the rich we can do what we want."</p>
<p>If you have been keeping up with the news from Britain, then you know who bears the blame for this: conservatives!</p>
<p>The "deep cutbacks in social programs" made by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron "have hit the country's poor especially hard," reported a major U.S. newspaper, "including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest."</p>
<p>The "unrest." Nice touch.</p>
<p>This line has been trotted out by others&mdash;most notoriously "Red Ken" Livingstone, the former mayor of London. As well as a London MP who cited "disillusionment." And an analysis on <em>Salon</em> that blamed "youth unemployment." And NPR ("The unrest has spread, apparently spurred by anger over the high cost of living" as well as economic "disparity"). And <em>The Washington Post</em>'s Courtland Milloy (the rioters are "striking out in anger over the theft of their futures").</p>
<p>A scholar at Johns Hopkins blames "austerity cuts." So does <em>The New York Times</em>: "Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months." Reuters says a "sense of disenchantment" is shared by a "generation of young people with opportunities that fall well short of their aspirations." And&mdash;</p>
<p>Well, you get the point: Yes, the hooligans have destroyed family businesses, trashed London institutions, sent millions of real and sweat equity up in flames, inflicted misery on thousands of innocent people. But one mustn't judge too harshly. One must try to understand. And to mollify.</p>
<p>You hear that sort of flummery a lot.</p>
<p>Or at least you hear it when the perpetrators of mayhem are objects of liberal approval. Labor unions, demonstrators against global free-trade agreements, environmentalist activists&mdash;they have legitimate grievances that must be addressed. The blind rage of young people in working-class neighborhoods is the product of socioeconomic conditions. They should not be held responsible for their actions&mdash;the people who created the conditions should be held responsible. (David Cameron, this means you.)</p>
<p>Funny thing, though: You didn't hear that sort of guff in 2009, when middle-class conservatives turned up at town halls across the country to vent about health-care reform. Back then, the town-hall events were filled with "angry, sign-carrying mobs," wrote <em>Politico</em>, which lamented the way constituents were "shouting criticism" at members of Congress. Signs and criticism: Oh my!</p>
<p>"Angry mobs" were trying to "destroy president Obama," fumed Democratic Party leaders back then. "This is something new and ugly," seethed Paul Krugman of <em>The New York Times</em>, which described the town hall events as "brutal." No one seemed interested in the root causes of the sign-wavers' agitation then. You didn't hear much about the "disillusionment" and "disenchantment" of Tea Party protesters who marched on Washington in September 2009, and again the following March.</p>
<p>To be fair, after the Taxpayer March on Washington on 9/12, Reuters did pause to wonder what the source of public anger was: "Protests Against Obama: Race or Policy?" it asked, noting how "former President Jimmy Carter said out loud what Democrats had been whispering for a while, that the protests against the country's first black president are tinged with racism."</p>
<p>When conservatives wave signs, it's not "unrest" caused by a "sense of disenchantment." It's because they're bigots. Society as a whole is not to blame; they are, individually. They need an attitude adjustment. When violent mobs of young people burn down a city, though, they are not individually responsible&mdash;society as a whole is (or at least that part of society that ostensibly ticked them off). They don't need an attitude adjustment: conservatives do.</p>
<p>Memo to Britain's ruling party: Look what you made those poor kids do!</p>
<p>This neat bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu ensures that, no matter what happens, one side is always to blame.</p>
<p>Here in the U.S. we've just been through a budget showdown in which the side that wanted government spending to grow at a slightly less rapid pace than the other side wanted was denounced as terrorists in the literal sense. So far, none of those who called peaceful Tea Party activists terrorists have flung the same accusation at the British rioters who have inflicted genuine terror. Interesting.</p>
<p>To be sure, those progressives seeking to understand what motivates the rioters in London do not actually endorse their behavior. They do not think individuals&mdash;no matter how aggrieved&mdash;should take it upon themselves to storm into other people's shops and homes and "redistribute the wealth" as they see fit. After all: That, such progressives say, is government's job.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/aug/12/tdopin02-hinkle-hey-conservatives-look-what-you-ma-ar-1233180/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.</em></p>1012066@http://www.reason.orgMon, 15 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Al Qaeda Psychos Butcher Newspaper Staff!http://www.reason.org/news/show/al-qaeda-psychos-butcher-newspaper
<p>I was savagely attacked by a crazed terrorist last week&mdash;and barely survived to tell the tale.</p>
<p>OK, that might be a slight exaggeration. What actually happened was, Virginia senatorial candidate Jamie Radtke dropped in. She shook hands with the <em>Richmond</em> <em>Times-Dispatch</em> Editorial Department staff and talked.</p>
<p>Still&mdash;it was a very narrow escape for all of us. We were <em>this</em> close to having our heads sawed off with a rusty knife. Because you see, Radtke is a Tea Party Republican.</p>
<p>According to Froma Harrop, the new president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW), Radtke's Tea Party roots place her among those who "have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States." (Harrop, incidentally, will spearhead the NCEW's newest venture, which is called&mdash;kid you not&mdash;the Civility Project.)</p>
<p>To Harrop and nine out of 10 other pundits, Tea Party Republicans are "insane," "ultraorthodox" extremists&mdash;"political suicide bombers," says Maureen Dowd of <em>The New York Times.</em> As Dowd's colleague Nicholas Kristof put it two Sundays ago, Radtke and her ilk are "the biggest threat to America's national security."</p>
<p>Well, tell you what: The terrorist crazies are getting savvier. Not so long ago they all seemed to be Middle Eastern men with glassy eyes and moist upper lips, wearing big overcoats to hide their explosive belts. Once in a while they'd show up as racist yahoos like Timothy McVeigh or Luddite hermits like the Unabomber.</p>
<p>But Radtke wasn't wearing a vest at all. Neither was her advance man, Chuck Hansen. The mother of three wore a business suit and heels; he was Friday casual. They could have fooled anyone&mdash;even an Israeli airport profiler. They looked like perfectly normal, middle-class Americans.</p>
<p>They sounded like it, too. Radtke didn't shout "death to America!" even once. She didn't quote a single line from The Turner Diaries. (She might have fired a few rounds from an AK-47 into the ceiling for emphasis once or twice&mdash;but who doesn't?)</p>
<p>She did talk a lot about George Allen, the former Virginia governor and senator she wants to take the GOP nomination from. She's got a long slog ahead of her on that score: According to a recent poll Allen beats her 11-1 in a hypothetical primary. Seventy-seven percent of Virginians don't even recognize her name.</p>
<p>But Radtke thinks she has enough time to overcome that obscurity. And she thinks Allen's record leaves her an opportunity to win over at least the Republican wing of the Republican Party, which is the wing that counts in nominating contests.</p>
<p>She remarks with amusement on Allen's tergiversations over the corn-ethanol subsidy: He once was "a reliable vote against expanding the ethanol industry," noted <em>The</em> <em>Des Moines Register</em> in 2005. As he began to think about the presidency, he switched (a spokesman said his position had "evolved with technology").</p>
<p>This year Allen supported a measure to end ethanol support, claiming to have "long maintained" such a position. It depends on what the meaning of "long" is. A spokesman said Allen had held that view since 2007. Radtke laughs, and points out a 2008 piece in which Allen supported a dollar-a-gallon tax credit for ethanol blends sold in the U.S.</p>
<p>In sum: Allen stood (a) against government support for the ethonol industry, (b) then for it, (c) then against it again, unless (d) the ethanol is sold domestically. Now he might be against it categorically, unless he's changed his mind again. Check your watch.</p>
<p>Radtke also rakes Allen over the coals for his conversion on raising the debt ceiling: He voted for it four times, but a spokesman says he would have voted "nay" this time. And she tweaks him relentlessly for his past support of big-government notions such as the High Speed Rail Investment Act.</p>
<p>For his part, Allen&mdash;tacking right&mdash;says he regrets his past support for the Bush administration's expansion of domestic government through Medicare Part D and the No Child Left Behind Act. But he also supported other measures to expand the scope of government: the Patriot Act most notoriously, but also the Military Commissions Act and, his principal contribution to federal law, a measure to pump billions into nanotechnology research. No wonder a slice of the, ah, "Republican street" is upset. Some Kiwanis conservatives may feel about Allen as diehard liberals do about Barack Obama: betrayed.</p>
<p>But it's easy to talk big when you don't have to back it up. Radtke never has served in Congress. She's never even held elective office. (Then again: Neither did one of liberalism's patron saints, Paul Wellstone, before he became a senator.) She never has had the pleasure of having her arm twisted by the White House, party leaders, and campaign contributors with chits to cash in. Maybe once in office she, too, would fold like a wet sock.</p>
<p>Or maybe she'd just cut off their heads. You never can tell with those crazy terrorist types.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article&nbsp;<a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/2011/may/04/TDOPIN02-hinkle-the-ag-goes-after-michael-manns-ha-ar-1014495/">originally appeared</a>&nbsp;at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.</em></p>1012031@http://www.reason.orgTue, 09 Aug 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Eminent Domain in the Old Dominionhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/eminent-domain-in-the-old-dominion
<p>&ldquo;Better a bleeding heart than none at all,&rdquo; say some progressives, perhaps a trifle too smugly. No matter: Those who consider kindness a primary political virtue should make common cause with conservatives who are motivated by regard for property rights in order to fight eminent-domain abuse. Because it is there that government shows a real mean streak.</p>
<p>Take a case now playing out in Virginia Beach. In 2009 the city condemned a spot of beach on the Chesapeake Bay in order to take it for a sand-replenishment project and public access. According to a December 2008 story in the <em>Virginian-Pilot</em>, &ldquo;the city wants to dump the sand from the Lynnhaven Inlet dredging project...Most of the property owners have agreed, and many want the sand. In exchange, the city is asking the owners to agree that the public has a right to use the beach for recreation. But some property owners say their deeds give them the beach.&rdquo;</p>
<p>One of the latter group is Tommy Sheets, who owns about a quarter-acre of beach. The city claimed the property was worth $4,000. But on June 9 of this year, a jury said the city should pay Sheets $152,000 for his property. In response, the city has decided&mdash;surprise!&mdash;it owned easement rights to the property all along, so it doesn&rsquo;t have to pay Sheets a dime.</p>
<p>As Joe Waldo, a lawyer representing the Sheets family, put it recently, Virginia Beach&rsquo;s plan to grab the land on the cheap backfired. So now it&rsquo;s trying an end-run around its own citizens&mdash;not to mention the judicial system and the city citizens who ruled in Sheets&rsquo; favor.</p>
<p>This is hardly an isolated case. A few weeks ago <em>The Roanoke Times</em> detailed the case of Ed Jennings, a farmer who has been fighting the Virginia Department of Transportation off and on for more than three decades. VDOT tried to claim it owed Jennings nothing for the harm it did him when it rebuilt the I-77 bridge above his farm, dumping tons of debris onto his property. Judge Josiah Showalter Jr., disagreed&mdash;and a jury will decide what VDOT owes.</p>
<p>Then there&rsquo;s the case of Wanda Beavers, who runs the Leave It to Beaver childcare center in a working-class section of south Richmond. VDOT condemned part of her property to widen German School Road, and offered the measly sum of $6,683. Beavers asked for $30,000. The state took her to court instead&mdash;and lost, big-time. A jury awarded Beavers more than $52,000. Add $61,000 in lawyers&rsquo; fees the state had to shell out to fight the case, and the taxpayers ended up on the hook for almost four times Beavers&rsquo; original asking price.</p>
<p>These are not even the worst cases in Virginia. The state has seen several more egregious ones in the past several years. Roanoke&rsquo;s housing and redevelopment agency seized a flooring company&rsquo;s building to hand it over to the multi-billion-dollar Carillion health clinic...which then said it never wanted the property in the first place. Norfolk&rsquo;s housing and redevelopment agency has fought to seize several privately owned parcels in order to get them conveyed to private developers with deeper pockets. And in case after case after case&mdash;including the current case in Virginia Beach&mdash;officials have lowballed estimates of land value when condemning property, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>The common denominator? The big guys putting the muscle on the little guys. Surely that is something every good progressive will abhor.</p>
<p>Some of the blame for the situation rests at the feet of the Supreme Court. Its infamous decision in <em>Kelo</em> and prior cases allowed local officials to seize property from one private party and give it to another private party if there is any chance the second party might pay higher taxes. This is the &ldquo;public purpose&rdquo; that supplanted the Fifth Amendment&rsquo;s plain requirement that property be seized only for public &ldquo;use.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Virginia lawmakers wisely reacted to <em>Kelo</em> by enacting measures designed to prevent such abuse. But the Constitution&rsquo;s language about property rights has two prongs, not just one. Not only must the government take private property only for a &ldquo;public use&rdquo;&mdash;it cannot do so &ldquo;without just compensation.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s painfully clear local and state officials seem woefully ignorant of that second prong. Maybe it&rsquo;s time state lawmakers gave an education to those who have been a little less than kind.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em>&nbsp;Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article&nbsp;<a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/aug/05/tdopin02-hinkle-governments-mean-streak-shows-up-i-ar-1218758/">originally appeared</a>&nbsp;at the</em>&nbsp;Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1012016@http://www.reason.orgFri, 05 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )We're from the Government and We're Here to Helphttp://www.reason.org/news/show/were-from-the-government-and-were-h
<p>Last week in <em>Mother Jones</em>, Kevin Drum argued that the recent contretemps over the national debt had only a single cause. Defense, discretionary, and interest spending are mostly on a downward slope as a percentage of GDP, he claimed; Social Security is "basically fine"&mdash;but not health spending. "The only thing we should be seriously concerned about," he concluded, "is health care spending. Period."</p>
<p>In other words, the federal government's management of its health care programs has turned out to be a financial disaster. So what, according to progressives, is the solution? More government management of health care. Of course.</p>
<p>If Drum is right, then the political fight of 2011 is an astounding development&mdash;because Democrats won the political fight of 2010. That fight concerned the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare&mdash;whose stated purpose, as the president put it on numerous occasions, was to "bend the cost curve downward."</p>
<p>To that end, the legislation includes something known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB. IPAB is a 15-member panel whose purpose is to impose cuts on Medicare spending&mdash;i.e., to ration care. IPAB is universally despised by conservatives. A lot of liberals don't much care for it, either: More than 70 Democrats wanted it excised from the final version of the legislation, and a number of them have signed onto a measure to abolish the panel.</p>
<p>Yet some object to IPAB precisely because it constitutes what Doug Schoen termed, on The Huffington Post, "a threat to critical medical treatments and services." Democratic Rep. Allyson Schwartz calls IPAB a "flawed policy that will risk beneficiary access to care." In short, they do not want to bend the cost curve downward.</p>
<p>Or at least not by rationing medical treatment. Many are happy to do so by other means. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius has issued a rule requiring insurance companies to justify rate increases over 10 percent, for instance. The administration also has imposed a medical loss ratio rule under which insurance companies are forbidden to spend less than 80 percent of collected premiums on medical treatment. ObamaCare also imposes a variety of expensive mandates, and it outright forbids low-coverage "mini-med plans" (although the administration is happy to waive that rule for its political friends).</p>
<p>As a result, the business community is scampering for the exits. A survey by McKinsey &amp; Company finds that almost half of all employers say they will stop providing insurance for their workers after ObamaCare goes into full effect. Seventy-eight million Americans may lose their employer-provided coverage.</p>
<p>Perhaps more than that: The National Federation of Independent Business just released a survey showing that 57 percent of companies with 50 or fewer employers also may cease offering insurance. Millions more Americans must then turn to the new state "exchanges" to buy policies heavily subsidized by Washington. ObamaCare drives people from private insurance to government insurance.</p>
<p>Then there are those progressives who would like to see IPAB expanded, not abolished. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw draws attention to a proposal by the Center for American Progress&mdash;a Democratic think tank (president John Podesta was Bill Clinton's chief of staff), funded by George Soros, that <em>Time</em> magazine compares to the conservative Heritage Foundation in influence.</p>
<p>The Center has proposed what it calls a "failsafe mechanism" in case, as seems increasingly likely, ObamaCare does not deliver the promised reductions in health-care spending. "Our failsafe would be triggered if, starting in 2020, total economy-wide health care expenditures grow at a rate faster than the economy. Should that happen, we would empower the IPAB to extend successful reforms in Medicare and other public programs to insurance plans offered in the health care exchanges and then potentially to all health care plans , such that the target is met." (Emphasis added.)</p>
<p>Under that scenario, 15 unelected bureaucrats would make the medical decisions for everyone.</p>
<p>And as government involvement in health care spreads, personal freedom retreats. Witness the recent campaign against obesity, now considered a matter of "public health" because government has socialized the costs. First Washington said: "Jim, we are going to make you pay for Robert's health care." Now it says: "Robert, we are now going to make you eat right&mdash;because poor Jim here is stuck paying your insurance."</p>
<p>Washington's increasing control of the nation's medical care means your most personal decisions become matters of public debate. There has been much dispute as to whether ObamaCare is a government takeover of health care. There can be no dispute that some of its principal backers want one&mdash;and will probably get their wish.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/aug/02/tdopin02-feds-wrecks-health-care-quick-call-in-mor-ar-1211174/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1012004@http://www.reason.orgTue, 02 Aug 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Does Your Body Belong to You?http://www.reason.org/news/show/does-your-body-belong-to-you
<p>&ldquo;Perhaps you&rsquo;ve noticed the trend among certain people these days,&rdquo; wrote Neil Genzlinger in <em>The New York Times</em> the other day, &ldquo;to decide that certain other people are not living acceptable lives and must be reformed.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Yes. There certainly is a lot of that going around.</p>
<p>You can see it in the comments from Michele Bachmann&rsquo;s husband, Marcus&mdash;who says homosexuals are &ldquo;barbarians&rdquo; who need to be &ldquo;educated&rdquo; and &ldquo;disciplined.&rdquo; The Bachmanns own a clinic that tries to make homosexuals go straight&mdash;a procedure as likely to succeed as trying to make a straight man gay.</p>
<p>You can see the trend in Arizona, Alabama, and other states that have imposed stiff penalties for employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants&mdash;i.e., individuals who moved to the U.S. without a government permission slip.</p>
<p>You can see it across the country in the attempts by Christian parents to have Harry Potter books removed from school libraries, to keep children from reading stories that supposedly promote witchcraft and the occult.</p>
<p>And when you finished reading Genzlinger&rsquo;s column of page A16 in last Sunday&rsquo;s <em>Times</em>, you also could see the trend he wrote about just a few pages further in&mdash;on the front of the <em>Times</em>&rsquo; Sunday Review section. &ldquo;What will it take,&rdquo; asked the paper&rsquo;s Mark Bittman, &ldquo;to get Americans to change our eating habits?&rdquo;</p>
<p>This is a subject of great concern to progressives today. Many of them are deeply distressed that&mdash;despite incessant lecturing on the subject&mdash;too many of their fellow citizens continue to eat what they like, rather than what progressives think they should eat.</p>
<p>Bittman&rsquo;s answer to this dilemma is to tax &ldquo;bad food&rdquo; and subsidize &ldquo;good food.&rdquo; He is far from alone. But this answer to the problem of too much food freedom rests on two major factual errors and a moral grotesquerie. The first factual error is the belief that healthful foods cost too much. Nonsense: For the price of a single&nbsp;fast-food combo meal you can buy a week&rsquo;s worth of fruits and vegetables.</p>
<p>The second error is Bittman&rsquo;s claim that &ldquo;efforts to shift the national diet have failed, because education alone is no match for marketing dollars that push the very foods that are the worst for us.&rdquo; Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University in Northern Virginia, makes quick work of this foolishness&mdash;in a response to a different piece&mdash;on his blog, Caf&eacute; Hayek.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; he asks, &ldquo;doesn&rsquo;t McDonald&rsquo;s simply serve raw celery? Celery being much less costly for McDonald&rsquo;s to buy than ground beef and chicken patties, a raw-celery-only menu at McDonald&rsquo;s would slash that company&rsquo;s costs. And with its nefarious facility at using &lsquo;advertising and marketing&rsquo; to hypnotize consumers into buying whatever it peddles (even &lsquo;nasty killer foods&rsquo;!), that fast-food behemoth will keep consumers spending as much on McCelery stalks as consumers now spend on Happy Meals and Egg McMuffins. McDonald&rsquo;s profits will zoom upward!&rdquo; (The answer is obvious: Consumers have the last word.)</p>
<p>The moral grotesquerie comes later in the piece, when Bittman offers the rationale for his scheme: Some might &ldquo;argue that their right to eat whatever they wanted was being breached,&rdquo; he concedes, &ldquo;but public health is the role of the government, and our diet is right up there with any other public responsibility you can name, from water treatment to mass transit.&rdquo; Besides, &ldquo;health-related obesity costs are projected to reach $344 billion by 2018&mdash;with roughly 60 percent of that cost borne by the federal government.&rdquo; In short, the government should dictate what you eat for the sake of the collective good.</p>
<p>Bittman used to write about recipes, so perhaps he does not know of Kant&rsquo;s categorial imperative, which instructs us to treat people as ends in themselves&mdash;not as mere means to an end. Using government coercion to dictate other people&rsquo;s food choices in order to save money on government programs is a blinding violation of that moral precept.<br /> Nevertheless, Bittman says it is &ldquo;fun&mdash;inspiring, even&rdquo; to think about the various ways government could order people about: &ldquo;We&rdquo; could convert soda machines to &ldquo;machines that dispense grapes and carrots.&rdquo; &ldquo;We&rdquo; could sell vegetables, grains, legumes, and fruit &ldquo;cheap&mdash;let&rsquo;s say for 50 cents a pound&mdash;and almost everywhere: drugstores, street corners, convenience stores, bodegas. . . &rdquo;</p>
<p>Just one problem: &ldquo;We&rdquo; do not own the drug stores or bodegas&mdash;so we have no right to dictate what they stock.<br /> The progressive campaign against obesity relies on the assumption that the individual no longer owns his or her body&mdash;rather, society as a whole does. This has some profound implications for, say, abortion. And Bittman&rsquo;s contribution to that campaign should serve as a warning: Anyone who thinks it would be &ldquo;fun&rdquo; to use government power to dictate everyone else&rsquo;s choices&mdash;from sex partner to dinner menu&mdash;should not be allowed anywhere near it.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jul/29/tdopin02-does-your-body-belong-to-you-ar-1203962/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011986@http://www.reason.orgFri, 29 Jul 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Is the Tea Party Crazy or Just Nuts?http://www.reason.org/news/show/is-the-tea-party-crazy-or-just-nuts
<p>The late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was a man of the hard left&mdash;"the Senate's most liberal member," as Mickey Kaus once termed him in the liberal online journal <em>Slate</em>. Wellstone opposed the first Iraq War&mdash;and the second one. He was no friend of the Second Amendment&mdash;or the First. He thought the government should strictly control campaign ads by groups such as the Sierra Club and the NRA. Even <em>The New York Times</em>, which supports the rationing of political speech, called Wellstone's idea a proposal "of questionable constitutionality."</p>
<p>Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002, and was immediate lionized. <em>The Washington Post</em> called him one of the Senate's "leading liberals. . . . Colleagues from across the political spectrum praised Wellstone as a passionate advocate for his beliefs." He was "a hero to the left," the paper said, noting "there was little doubt where his heart lay." To <em>The New York Times</em>, Wellstone was "a rumpled, unfailingly modest man," a "firebrand," and although "his opponents always portrayed him as a left-wing extremist," Wellstone was "so happy, so comfortable, so unthreatening that he was able to ward off the attacks." Rumor has it he once fed a crowd with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.</p>
<p>This is not, to put it mildly, how Tea Partiers and their congressional cohort have been portrayed during the recent game of chicken over the debt ceiling. Rather, those opposed to raising the debt ceiling&mdash;or willing to do so in exchange for a slowdown in the rate of government growth&mdash;are "obstreperous," "flatly and dangerously wrong," and "not interested in governing." (These are all quotes from major media organs, not obscure blogs.) They're "crazy" proponents of a "dangerous delusion"&mdash;"ridiculous," "extremist," "ultraorthodox tax haters," players of "ideological games," "totally unrealistic," authors of "madness," etc. etc.</p>
<p>Hey, what happened to people of conviction? Aren't the Tea Partiers "firebrands"? Isn't there little doubt where their hearts lie?</p>
<p>Rather than praise Tea Partiers as passionate advocates for their beliefs, many in the press have taken to marginalizing them with mean-spirited attacks on their sanity. Wellstone, who championed the rights of the mentally ill, would not be proud.</p>
<p>At this point it might be useful to clarify precisely what the dispute concerns. The question is not whether the federal government should grow. As <em>Reason</em>'s Nick Gillespie pointed out a few days ago, nearly nobody in Washington has actually proposed shrinking the leviathan. To the contrary, the dispute is whether to raise federal spending from the current $3.8 trillion to $4.7 trillion over the next decade (the Paul Ryan plan)&mdash;or to $5.7 trillion (the Obama plan).<br /> Bear in mind that those increases would come on top of one of the fastest expansions of federal spending in U.S. history. When President Obama took office, the budget stood at $2.9 trillion. Two. Point. Nine.</p>
<p>Spending has risen 30 percent in the past three years. It is quite a feat to grow federal spending faster than the Bush administration: Under Bush, domestic discretionary spending rose faster than at any time since the Lyndon Johnson administration.</p>
<p>If Bush floored the accelerator, then Obama lit the afterburners. And nobody in Washington (except Sen. Rand Paul and perhaps Sen. Tom Coburn) has suggested applying the brakes. For the most part, the cuts being discussed are reductions in the rate of future growth. What does that mean? This: (a) your rent is $10,000 this year; (b) you thought you were going to spend $15,000 next year; but (c) you've decided to spend only $12,000&mdash;therefore, (d) you've "cut" your housing expenses by $3,000.</p>
<p>Washington already spends quite enough, thank you very much. But to say this is not (as some on the left have snidely suggested) to argue that big business and the rich should not help solve the debt problem. They certainly should&mdash;and programs benefitting the well-off should be first on the chopping block: farm subsidies, export promotion, and so on. Welfare for big corporations should disappear entirely before the first dollar of welfare for poor individuals is touched. Likewise, the Defense Department needs to go on a diet. (Coburn's plan has a host of suggestions about how to put it on one.)</p>
<p>You won't find Tea Party activists cheering on corporate welfare, either. They're not exactly lining up to defend the Agriculture Department's market-access program, the Commerce Department's research grants (read: handouts) to high-tech companies, or the U.S. Maritime Administration's loan guarantees to help facilitate the purchase of ships from U.S. shipyards. Many of them and their ideological compatriots would be more than happy to cut those government programs, and plenty more. Rand Paul would eliminate the Commerce and Energy Departments entirely, for instance.</p>
<p>You'd think liberals would be glad to hear it. But they are not, because those ideas are part of the overall tea party belief that government cannot continue to grow at an ever-accelerating rate&mdash;a belief now dismissed as not only wrong, but clinically insane.</p>
<p>The sad part? By Washington standards, it probably is.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jul/26/tdopin02-tea-partiers-passionate-advocates-or-just-ar-1196093/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. <br /></em></p>1011972@http://www.reason.orgTue, 26 Jul 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Fundamentalists vs. the First Amendmenthttp://www.reason.org/news/show/fundamentalists-vs-the-first-amendm
<p>Religious fundamentalists threaten the American way of life by seeking to impose their will upon us, because they hate our freedoms. So say lawmakers in a growing number of (mostly Bible Belt) states who have introduced measures to forbid the use of Shariah law in state courts. The lawmakers are like the woman in Kansas who recited a special chant to keep the Bengal tigers away. Informed that there were no Bengal tigers, she replied that the chant must be working.</p>
<p>The likelihood that civic authorities in Alabama or Georgia will start taking orders from Islamic fanatics by, say, issuing fatwas seems remote. As for whether civic authorities might start taking orders from Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalists&mdash;well, better ask Laura George.</p>
<p>George would like to set up an interfaith spiritual retreat in Independence, Va. (motto: "In God We Will Grow"), which is the county seat for Grayson County. Last year the county planning commission unanimously approved her proposal&mdash;consisting of the retreat, an education center, a library, and 10 cabins.</p>
<p>At that point, it seems, Grayson County went nuts.</p>
<p>According to an account by Susan Kinzie of <em>The Washington Post</em>, "prayer groups sprang up to stop her. ... So many people filled the Board of Supervisors hearing (in June 2010) that the panel had to move into a courtroom upstairs. After pastors and others spoke at the hearing, many saying that the project was anti-Christian, a cult and a threat to the community, the board killed it." The story quotes Rhonda James, one of the project's many opponents, who says she is "glad it didn't come. ... I'm a Christian, fundamentalist Christian, and so are most people in the area."</p>
<p>George is now suing, with the help of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute, which champions civil liberties. Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead calls the rejection of George's application a clear violation of the First Amendment, not to mention Virginia's constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and religion.</p>
<p>In the lawsuit, the Rutherford Institute notes that more than a dozen local ministers urged the county's Board of Supervisors to turn down George's application, on the grounds that her philosophy and religious orientation are not in keeping with Christian doctrine. Not only that, they are heretical and&mdash;really&mdash;"communist." That last seems a bit rich. If you go to the Oracle Institute's website, you'll find that its mission statement quotes at length not from Karl Marx, but from Thomas Jefferson.</p>
<p>Naturally, county officials deny that George's non-denominationalism had anything to do with the supervisors unanimously rejecting her application. Rather, it was a matter of protecting the health and safety of county residents. Because as we all know, interfaith services are more dangerous than dioxin.</p>
<p>Since then, county attorney Jim Guynn has had the opportunity to refine the county's position. He told the <em>Post</em>'s reporter that speakers at the Board of Supervisors hearing did not say only that George's faith went against God. Some of them also raised concerns about zoning and property values.</p>
<p>Alas for Grayson County, that dog won't hunt, either. For one thing, county regulations stipulate that if the planning commission approves a permit like the one George seeks, then they should be deemed appropriate "as a matter of right."</p>
<p>Well, a county ordinance is not exactly federal law. RLUIPA, on the other hand, is. The acronym stands for the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which Congress passed by unanimous consent in 2000. The sponsor was Sen. Orrin Hatch.</p>
<p>RLUIPA stipulates that governments cannot apply land-use regulations in a manner that incommodes religious assemblies, unless (a) they are doing so for the sake of a compelling government interest, and (b) the burden being imposed is the least restrictive means of pursuing that interest.</p>
<p>Mighty high bar there.</p>
<p>Congress passed RLUIPA as a rebuke to the Supreme Court&mdash;which had struck down a previous statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), as overly broad. The particulars of the backstory are instructive.<br /> Back in 1990, the Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law forbidding the use of peyote, a drug used in Native American religious rituals. Faith groups worried that the precedent could lead to more laws that infringed on religious practices, so Congress passed RFRA.</p>
<p>A few years later Patric Flores, the Catholic Archbishop of San Antonio, wanted to expand his church in Boerne, Texas. Zoning officials said no. So Flores sued under RFRA. The high court struck RFRA down for technical reasons too abstruse to dwell on here. Congress then retaliated with the more narrowly tailored RLUIPA.</p>
<p>Five years after its passage, several Ohio prison inmates tried to use RLUIPA to get authorities to recognize their decidedly non-mainstream religions: Wicca, Satanism, Asatru, and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, a white-supremacist sect. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the inmates' favor. Compared with the inmates' religions, Laura George's views seem positively tame.</p>
<p>What's interesting about all this history is that at least since 1990, it constitutes a march toward greater religious freedom. Jefferson, whose Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom Laura George so copiously quotes, would nod in approval. But then, by the current standards of Grayson County, Jefferson was a dirty commie.<em><br /></em></p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jul/19/contact-a-barton-hinkle-at-804-649-6627-or-the-rel-ar-1180906/"> originally appeared</a> in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.</em></p>1011935@http://www.reason.orgTue, 19 Jul 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Sports vs. Social Justicehttp://www.reason.org/news/show/sports-vs-social-justice
<p>Last weekend Derek Jeter made baseball history when he became only the 28th MLB player to reach 3,000 hits. He's the only player to do it wearing the Yankees uniform.</p>
<p>For diehard Yankees fans, Jeter may be worth all the money on Earth. But many less ardent enthusiasts probably wonder whether even someone as good as Jeter should be raking in his kind of dough: $51 million for the current three-year contract, plus millions more in endorsement money. Jeter recently paid $7 million to have a house built&mdash;a 31,000-square-foot house. That's about the size of a typical Barnes &amp; Noble.</p>
<p>We are talking here about a grown man who earns his living by hitting a little white ball thrown at him by another grown man. Jeter didn't cure cancer. He doesn't even teach high school biology. The average teacher makes something like three-tenths of 1 percent of Jeter's base salary. Is there any possible way to justify his being paid that much?</p>
<p>Actually, yes. There are a couple of ways.</p>
<p>Patrick Rishe, who blogs on the business of sports for <em>Forbes</em> magazine, provides one by asking if the Yankees organization is getting its money's worth.</p>
<p>He finds that the Yankees generated about $3.85 billion from 1996 to 2010. Divide that by the team's 1,460 wins and you get about $2.638 million per win. Jeter's wins-above-replacement data suggest he personally added 70 wins to the Yankees record during that same period. (In other words, if the team had replaced Jeter with some random schmo, then it would have lost 70 more games than it did.)</p>
<p>Rishe calculates that, at $2.638 million per win, Jeter alone made about $185 million for the organization during the past 15 years. His aggregate salary was $205 million. So he earned 90 percent of his keep in wins alone. His marquee value to the franchise might make up the rest.</p>
<p>Rishe concludes by noting that Jeter's latest contract might overestimate his performance value. We'll see. For now it appears Jeter is worth pretty much what his bosses pay him.</p>
<p>But what about the rest of us? Jeter's millions might be a good deal for the Yankees, but don't they stray from what is often called "social justice"? What does it say about a society that pays a teacher thousands and a shortstop millions?</p>
<p>At this point it helps to consider Wilt Chamberlain, who was once to basketball what Jeter is to baseball today. In what has become known as the Wilt Chamberlain Hypothetical, the late philosopher Robert Nozick invites us to consider whether Chamberlain is entitled to the fruits of his game-playing labor.</p>
<p>Suppose, Nozick said, that there is a society in which wealth has been distributed ideally, however you want to define "ideal." (In this case, let's say everyone has exactly the same amount of money.) Now suppose Chamberlain signs a contract that entitles him to 25 cents out of every admission ticket sale. In the course of a season, 1 million people attend the games to watch him play. At season's end Chamberlain ends up $250,000 richer than anyone else.</p>
<p>Is this unjust? If so, why?</p>
<p>Since the wealth was fairly distributed before the season, Nozick says, and there is nothing unjust about people freely choosing to spend their money on entertainment, then no injustice has occurred, so how can we say Chamberlain's additional resources are unjust?</p>
<p>Of course in the real world, the initial distribution of wealth might not be just. Still, people are not forced to pay Chamberlain or Jeter to play games with balls, are they? If they freely choose to do so, then how can we complain about the results?</p>
<p>Some more considerations: Unlike Jeter, whose exploits entertain millions, the typical schoolteacher has an audience of a couple hundred at most. If Jeter gets just 10 cents apiece from 10 million fans, each of whom would pay 10 bucks for the privilege of watching him play, then Jeter might be getting the short end of the deal, even though he earns $1 million. But a teacher earning $50,000 who teaches 100 children in the course of a year is, in effect, charging each of them 500 bucks. Do they find the instruction worth the money? Since they have to attend school and the teacher's salary is set by someone else, it's hard to say.</p>
<p>What's more, just about anyone can teach, in the same sense that just about anyone can play baseball. But most people won't pay even a buck to watch a next-door neighbor swing a bat. Very few individuals can play ball like Jeter can, and probably very few teachers teach as well as Jeter plays. So maybe we should compare the average teacher salary with the average salary in a minor-league club. (A triple-A rookie makes about $26,000.) Or, for that matter, with the average newspaper scribbler. How much does Glenn Beck make again?</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jul/15/tdopin02-hinkle-is-derek-jeter-worth-his-millions--ar-1173542/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011927@http://www.reason.orgFri, 15 Jul 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )The TSA's Invasive Search Contesthttp://www.reason.org/news/show/the-tsas-invasive-search-contest
<p><strong>MEMORANDUM<br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>To: All TSA Personnel<br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>From: Paul Witchowski, American Federation of Government Employees General Secretary and Past President and Steward of AFGE Local 277, Barnstable, MA.</strong></p>
<p>Dear Fellow Officers,</p>
<p>Many of you have written to ask me about the status of our Invasive Search Contest. Knowing this is a subject of great interest to all of you and that there has been a lot of rumors and innuendoes going around the "grapevine," I have decided to use this week&rsquo;s newsletter to fill everybody in on the latest developments.</p>
<p>Ever since New Orleans Transportation Security Officer Thibodeaux Broussard confiscated cans of Play-Doh from 3-year-old Josh Pitney, our TSA rank-and-file have really been "bringing their A game." The name Janice Johnson is well known to all of us by now and needs no introduction. Janice is the Northwest Florida Regional Airport TSA officer who insisted late last month that the 95-year-old mother of Destin resident Jean Weber remove her dirty adult diaper that she was wearing so Janice and her fellow TSA officers could proceed with our Wheelchair-Bound Traveler Protocol (WBTP).</p>
<p>The story of officer Johnson&rsquo;s dedication and professionalism has garnered a lot of attention with Google showing more than 3 million results if you search for the terms "TSA" and "diaper." As the front-line of defense against terrorism, foreign agents, and leukemia-riddled little old ladies in wheelchairs, TSA officers are usually the "unsung heroes" of homeland security but it is safe to say that is not the case with officer Johnson. We should all give a shout-out to Janice! You go, girl!</p>
<p>Needless to say Janice is now at the top of our Invasive Search Contest Leader Board. But there are several other strong contenders, including Mike Rogan of our Kansas City International Airport team, who gained fame far and wide back in May when he was photographed searching a baby&rsquo;s diaper. Needless to say, Mike did not find any PETN or other high explosives though we hear he did detect the residue from an organic "stink bomb," ha ha! When you add that diaper search to the one in Florida it is no wonder people are beginning to say the TSA screening procedures are full of you-know-what!</p>
<p>Another strong contender is Becky Wilson of Bedford, Texas, who works at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and had the privilege of searching former Miss USA pageant winner Susie Castillo. Sort of like the baby at KCI, Miss Castillo also made a "big stink" about how she was treated in late April, claiming she had been "molested." Of course all of us in the national-security field know better, don&rsquo;t we?</p>
<p>Also in April TSA officer Yolanda Smith, who works at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, was videotaped frisking six-year-old Anna Drexel. And TSA officers including Joe Dunbar were videotaped last November conducting a partial strip-search of a 10-year-old boy at Salt Lake City International Airport. Situations like these are simply not acceptable and I urge all of our members to contact their union reps to see if something can be done about this outrageous videotaping of TSA officers who are just doing their jobs.</p>
<p>Of course we also need to recognize Philip Davidson, the TSO whose pat-down of bladder-cancer survivor Thomas Sawyer at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in March broke the seal on Sawyer&rsquo;s urostomy bag, covering him (Sawyer, not officer Davidson) in urine. Finally we have to give some recognition to Officer Donna Baumgartner at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Last month officer Baumgartner ordered 32-year flight attendant and breast-cancer survivor Cathy Bossi to take her prosthetic breast out of her bra. That one&rsquo;s a keeper, folks!</p>
<p>Now maybe you are thinking, "Paul, there is just no way I can hope to win the invasive-search contest after hearing about cases like that." Don&rsquo;t be too sure! Many of you have probably seen the recent stories about how the Department of Homeland Security says terrorist groups are looking for ways to hide explosive devices inside the human body by using surgical implants.</p>
<p>Just the other day I read a story in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> about this. It said that implants are very common. And we all know that they are most common in the areas of the breasts, buttocks, and certain other portions of the anatomy. So I would say this means our Invasive Search Contest is still very far from over! With a little imagination, any one of you could be our Grand Prize Winner. All it takes is the right attitude and a pair of rubber gloves.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jul/12/tdopin02-hinkle-dear-fellow-tso-enter-your-search--ar-1165982/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011907@http://www.reason.orgTue, 12 Jul 2011 13:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )The Price of Big Governmenthttp://www.reason.org/news/show/the-price-of-big-government
<p>The bio for James Delingpole of the London <em>Telegraph</em> describes him as "a writer, journalist, and broadcaster who is right about everything." The rest of us should probably heed the counsel of a woman of my acquaintance who advises remaining open to the possibility that we might&mdash;just might!&mdash;occasionally be wrong.</p>
<p>There are lots of reasons to do so&mdash;e.g., well-deserved humility. What Churchill once said of Clement Atlee must be said as well of the journalist: "He is a humble man, with much to be humble about." Also, many issues resemble chess: You&rsquo;re no good if you can&rsquo;t play both sides of the board. Then there is confirmation bias: the annoying tendency (annoying in other people, anyway) to see only the evidence that agrees with us, and to avert our eyes from the evidence that does not.</p>
<p>So: Last week this column looked at the Obama administration&rsquo;s proposal to raise corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. It concluded, based on voluminous studies over the past couple of decades, that higher gas-mileage standards will, ceteris paribus, increase roadway fatalities. Tongue-in-cheek conclusion: Maybe government policies should come with warning labels like the gruesome ones now required for cigarettes.</p>
<p>But there are broader ways to look at the issue. For instance, one correspondent asks: What about the cost of blood for oil? "We are currently at war in two oil states (Iraq and Libya)," he writes, "and our third war (Afghanistan) was basically started by our pursuit of a renegade Saudi (named bin Laden) who happened to resent our influence in his native land."</p>
<p>Seems like a fair question. So far the U.S. has lost nearly 4,500 service members in Iraq and another 1,650 in Afghanistan. Assume&mdash;if only for the sake of argument&mdash;that the wars were fought solely for oil. According to the Energy Information Administration, the top six foreign suppliers of oil to the United States are Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iraq. Avoiding the war deaths would have required America to reduce petroleum consumption so much that it no longer needed oil from its second- and sixth-biggest suppliers.</p>
<p>Transportation accounts for roughly two-thirds of all U.S. oil consumption; reducing oil imports only on the transportation end would require huge leaps in fuel economy. Would the lives saved in wars foregone outnumber the additional lives lost on the highway? Someone with mad math skills will have to figure that one out.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s another wrinkle: If the U.S. reduced its oil consumption by (let&rsquo;s say) half, then rather than simply omit Saudi Arabia and Iraq from its list of importing countries, it might cut its Canadian imports by half, its Saudi imports by half, its Mexican imports by half, and so on.</p>
<p>In that case, the only way to avoid the war-for-oil deaths altogether would be to eliminate oil imports almost entirely, by switching nearly all vehicles to electric power. That would jack up coal and nuclear generation by orders of magnitude. (Then again, perhaps if the U.S. imported only half as much oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, that would not have sufficed to justify war. Probably impossible to say.)</p>
<p>What about another consideration: the fatalities induced by air pollution? (Air pollution from vehicles causes lots of health problems&mdash;$56 billion worth in 2005, according to the National Academy of Sciences&rsquo; report "The Hidden Cost of Energy"&mdash;as well as crop damage and various other negative externalities. But since last week&rsquo;s column addressed only vehicle fatalities due to CAFE standards&mdash;not injuries, lost productivity, and so on&mdash;let&rsquo;s keep it simple.)</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s no doubt improving fuel efficiency would reduce emissions and lower deaths. How much? Hard to say. A Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study claims more than 2,200 people died prematurely last year as a result of exposure to fine particulate matter from cars and trucks in big U.S. cities. The EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council contend that the administration&rsquo;s proposed goal&mdash;a 56.2 mph fleet average&mdash;would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 11.6 percent. Presumably other emissions, such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, would shrink proportionately as well.</p>
<p>On the other hand, as the EPA&rsquo;s Office of Transportation and Air Quality noted in a 2005 report, "cars are getting cleaner, but people are driving more." Indeed, higher fuel economy causes what is known as a rebound effect: On a per-mile basis, they make it less expensive to drive. So some of the gains from greater fuel efficiency are lost through induced demand. Besides, tighter standards&nbsp;would raise the cost of a new vehicle, inducing some people to keep their old clunkers longer. If reducing emissions is the goal, then raising the gasoline tax might be a more effective means.</p>
<p>Well, shoot. The goal of this column was to turn the chessboard around and play the black pieces. Reading it over, it seems I can&rsquo;t help turning the board around again to play white after each black move. Apparently my mind wants to slam shut even when I&rsquo;m consciously trying to keep it open. How &rsquo;bout yours?</p>
<p>Then again: Maybe, like Delingpole, I&rsquo;m simply right about everything.</p>
<p>Nah.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jul/08/tdopin02-hinkle-turning-the-chessboard-around-on-c-ar-1158749/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011894@http://www.reason.orgFri, 08 Jul 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Give Peace a Chancehttp://www.reason.org/news/show/give-peace-a-chance
<p>Boy, those sure have been some mighty peaceful protests against government budget cuts in Greece, haven&rsquo;t they? You bet they have&mdash;at least if you ignore the rock-throwing, fire-setting, window-smashing, and blood-spilling.</p>
<p>Which, it seems clear, a lot of major news organs would like to do. According to one story in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>, the demonstrations "began peacefully." According to another, last week Constitution Square in Athens "seethed with indignant, but peaceful, demonstrators."</p>
<p>"The day began noisily but peacefully," intoned <em>The New York Times</em> on Wednesday. <em>The Washington Post</em> likewise observed that "a peaceful protest . . . quickly degenerated into violence." Reuters reported that, regardless of "clashes between stone-throwing masked youths and riot police . . . thousands of peaceful protesters demonstrated against the austerity plan."</p>
<p>Sure, blood was spilled. But don&rsquo;t blame the protesters. As the <em>Journal</em> reported, it was Greece&rsquo;s parliament that approved a "widely hated austerity package" despite "the best efforts of peaceful grass-roots activists., megaphone-touting [sic] labor unionists, and stone-throwing anarchists."</p>
<p>This is a sharp contrast from how, say, Tea Party protests against the passage of ObamaCare were treated.</p>
<p>The D.C. protests in March of last year were nonviolent affairs, without a single arrest despite one disputed episode in which someone allegedly hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis and spat on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. (No independent report could verify the allegations.) But that didn&rsquo;t stop ABC&rsquo;s David Muir from reporting that "shouted words turned very ugly," and reporting on "late word from Washington tonight about just how ugly the crowds gathered outside the Longworth office building have become."</p>
<p>Last April,&nbsp;a <em>New York Times</em>&nbsp;news story tsk-tsked "the pitched attacks by some Republicans and conservatives during the health care fight," which "have drawn criticism as incendiary." ("Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, But Angry Nonetheless," the paper noted in yet another fair and balanced look at the movement.) "Protesters at some town hall meetings have drowned out congresspeople and caused unrest and even violence," reported CBS. Were the town halls "mostly peaceful"?&nbsp;Didn't they "begin peacefully"? Sure&mdash;but CBS didn&rsquo;t say so. Wonder how come.</p>
<p>Allegations of violent tendencies continue to dog the tea party despite the fact that it is, like its liberal analogs, "mostly peaceful." "Tea Party Getting Violent?" asked CBS News last March. To the <em>Christian Science Monitor</em>, a Boston tea party event (no arrests there either) was made up of "an angry white mob." At a Tea Party event in Nevada, <em>Time</em> magazine lamented the presence of (brace yourself) "ugly signs."</p>
<p>Hey, what happened to "indignant but peaceful"?</p>
<p>It's obvious what happened: big-government bias. To much of the establishment media, a preference for limited government is a dangerous idea. Ergo, its supporters must be dangerous, too. But liberals don't find a preference for big government threatening, so they view its supporters as non-threatening as well.</p>
<p>Nanoseconds after Jared Loughner went on his shooting rampage in Arizona in January, huge numbers of opinionators in the media knew just whom to blame: Sarah Palin, leaders of the Tea Party movement, and, by implication, anyone who thinks the government spends too much. As it turned out, Loughner&mdash;a schizophrenic declared incompetent to stand trial&mdash;was motivated by none of the above. Oops!</p>
<p>Fast-forward to the protests earlier this year against&nbsp;Republican Gov. Scott Walker&rsquo;s austerity measures in Wisconsin. Those protests involved the occupation of the statehouse, nine arrests in the first three days, and more than a few "ugly signs." Nevertheless, they were termed "largely peaceful" (<em>The Washington Post</em>); "largely peaceful, with only nine people cited for minor acts of civil disobedience" (ABC News); "loud but peaceful" (<em>The New York Times</em>); "peaceful" (<em>San Francisco Chronicle</em>); "respectful and peaceful" (<em>USA Today</em>); etc.</p>
<p>So it was with the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999:</p>
<p>"Some demonstrators fired bolts from slingshots, and others slashed the tires of squad cars," noted one news account. Nevertheless, <em>Time</em> magazine termed them&mdash;you guessed it&mdash;"largely peaceful." Likewise the 2003 protests leading up to the Iraq War: "The vast majority of demonstrators were peaceful," as a typical news story noted; a 2006 demonstration for immigrant rights ("largely peaceful"&mdash;CBS News, <em>Seattle Post-Intelligencer</em>, et al.) as well as another pro-immigration rally two years later ("largely peaceful"&mdash;<em>The New York Times</em>); protests by environmentalists in Denmark in 2009&mdash;where, according to UPI, "climate activists clashed with police at several demonstrations over the weekend." UPI nevertheless termed the affair "largely peaceful." Protests against Arizona&rsquo;s tough anti-immigration law? "Largely peaceful"&mdash;<em>USA Today</em>.</p>
<p>What about protests in favor of taking a hard line on immigration? Well, on rare occasions they do lead to violence. "L.A. Anti-Immigration Rally Turns Violent," CNN noted a number of years ago. Ironically, the immigration opponents were peaceful but "a group holding a counter-rally across the street marched over and began throwing punches, bottles, and full soda cans."</p>
<p>None of us should be so foolish as to think violence and incendiary rhetoric are the exclusive province of one side only. They&rsquo;re part of human nature, which everyone shares. So you have to wonder why press reports so insistently call one side "largely peaceful," even when it&rsquo;s not, while insinuating, with zero evidence, that the other side is about two seconds away from a killing spree.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s enough to make a guy feel downright indignant . . . but peaceful, of course. Indignant but peaceful.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jul/05/tdopin02-if-this-is-peaceful-how-does-violence-loo-ar-1151597/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. <br /></em></p>1011885@http://www.reason.orgTue, 05 Jul 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Unsafe at Any Speedhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/unsafe-at-any-speed
<p>When Washington unveiled its graphic new warning labels for cigarettes last week, several wits asked whether the federal government would slap similar warnings on its own products. To cite just one example: How many innocent civilians have died from unnecessary wars?</p>
<p>True, everyone already knows war is hell. But government policies can kill people in far less obvious ways. Take vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. The Obama administration has floated a proposal to more than double Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, from the current 27.5 miles per gallon to 56.2 mpg.</p>
<p>As usual, the auto industry says it can't be done. But it can be, or could be. The only question is whether society is willing to pay the cost. The higher standards would raise vehicle prices, by anywhere from $770 (the government's low-end estimate) to $10,000 (the Center for Automotive Research).</p>
<p>Yet that is only the most obvious price. Higher fuel-economy standards also would increase highway fatalities. That is because the most effective method of increasing gasoline mileage is to make cars smaller and lighter, which makes them more dangerous.</p>
<p>Can auto makers improve gas mileage in other ways? Sure they can. But engineers can squeeze only so much efficiency out of engines before the law of diminishing marginal returns kicks in. Same goes for better aerodynamics, keeping your tires properly inflated and so on. Steps like those will help&mdash;a little. To get where Washington wants to go requires far more radical changes.</p>
<p>That is why higher gasoline taxes have won endorsement from unusual suspects such as General Motors CEO Dan Akerson and Ford Motor Co.'s Bill Ford. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Sam Kazman noted in a recent piece for <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>, "In 2009 . . . Ford [cited] the need for a 'price signal . . . strong enough so customers will continue buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars.'" (Customers don't flock to them on their own because, among other things, big families need big vehicles.)</p>
<p>Advocates of higher CAFE standards are correct when they insist better safety features can mitigate some of the damage done by mandating smaller, lighter cars. But this is a rhetorical head-fake. True, a small car with crumple zones and airbags is safer than a big car that doesn't have them. But a big car with those same safety features is even safer than that.</p>
<p>Research from a wide variety of sources has borne this out time and again. A 1989 study by Harvard and the Brookings Institution found that CAFE standards caused a 500-pound reduction in the average vehicle, resulting in additional deaths of 2,200 to 3,900 persons per decade, depending on the model in question.</p>
<p>In 1999, <em>USA Today</em> reported that CAFE standards had been responsible for 46,000 deaths since 1978. In 2003, a study by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration found that reducing a vehicle's weight by 100 pounds increased fatality rates 3 percent for light trucks, 4.7 percent for big cars, and 5.6 percent for small cars.</p>
<p>Well, you get the point. In any contest between a big car and a small car, the laws of physics dictate that the big car will win. As the CEI's Kazman notes, "SUVs heavier than 4,500 pounds have a death rate less than one-third that of cars under 2,500 pounds."</p>
<p>Advocates of higher CAFE standards say the answer is simple: Get rid of all the big cars. Problem solved, right?</p>
<p>Wrong&mdash;not unless we're also going to shrink trees, telephone poles, and bridge abutments too. Ask yourself: Would you rather hit a telephone pole at 30 mph on a 600-pound Harley-Davidson motorcycle, or inside a 60-ton Abrams tank? In 2009 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported: "Occupants of smaller cars are at increased risk in all kinds of crashes, not just ones with heavier vehicles. Almost half of all crash deaths in [small cars] occur in single-vehicle crashes, and these deaths wouldn't be reduced if all cars became smaller and lighter." As the IIHS' Russ Rader put it last year, "We're trading more crash deaths for better fuel economy. That's the bottom line."</p>
<p>Well, so what? Society makes cost-benefit analyses all the time. Washington even has a standard figure, known as the value of a statistical life, to help it decide if a given regulation does more good than harm. So maybe, if you're of a strongly environmentalist bent and you believe we're killing the planet with exhaust fumes, you still think higher CAFE standards are worth the lives they will cost. Fair enough. That's a value judgment.</p>
<p>Still: Shouldn't it come with a warning label?</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This column <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jul/01/tdopin02-hinkle-fuel-economy-standards-need-a-warn-ar-1144573/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. <br /></em></p>1011880@http://www.reason.orgFri, 01 Jul 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Nanny State Propagandahttp://www.reason.org/news/show/nanny-state-propaganda
<p>Don&rsquo;t get too used to those graphic new cigarette warnings Washington regulators unveiled last week. They&rsquo;re going to disappear one way or the other.</p>
<p>The courts might throw them out on First Amendment grounds. That seems unlikely. But if the judicial branch doesn&rsquo;t get rid of them, the executive branch will. Not because it decided they were too repulsive. No, federal authorities plan to update the warning labels to keep the shock value fresh.</p>
<p>"We&rsquo;ll begin . . . studies to make sure that we are keeping people sensitized," says Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius. "What may seem quite shocking at the beginning, people get used to quite quickly." So if people build up a tolerance for the repulsive, the FDA will amp the dial up to grotesque.</p>
<p>Although the placement of graphic warning labels on commercial products is novel in the U.S., government&rsquo;s use of the gross-out is nothing new. Wartime propaganda posters of an earlier age routinely depicted the enemy as monstrous beasts to be slain or subhuman bugs to be exterminated.</p>
<p>Of course, no one backing the new warning labels would call them propaganda. Rather, the FDA&rsquo;s Lawrence Deyton says, "We are trying to communicate accurate, truthful information about the health impact of smoking, to allow consumers to be informed."</p>
<p>That is a lie. The old warnings&mdash;informing buyers that cigarettes cause cancer, and so forth&mdash;conveyed information. The new labels are designed to provoke a reaction in that lizard part of your brain thoughts never reach. A warning on a ladder that reads, "Caution: Improper use could lead to serious injury from falling" conveys information. A graphic photo of a compound tibia fracture conveys only sentiment.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s the kind of cheap trick you could play with just about anything. Take exercise. Sporting-equipment companies glamorize it just as cigarette companies glamorize smoking, with beautiful idols looking too cool for school as they engage in the activity. But you could de-glamorize exercise in a hurry by forcing people to view pictures of dislocated shoulders, torn ligaments, and genitals covered in raging cases of jock itch.</p>
<p>Since the gross-out is cross-functional, it&rsquo;s reasonable to ask when the federal government will start showing us disgusting pictures on packages of food, in which Washington also takes a keen interest. Indeed, someone asked Sibelius that very question during a press conference about the cigarette labels. Her response was evasive. Food labels are voluntary, she said. And tobacco is unique because smoking is "the No. 1 cause of preventable death."</p>
<p>It won&rsquo;t be No. 1 forever. Obesity is gaining ground fast. Sibelius says smoking imposes "$200 billion a year in health costs." According to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity costs the U.S. about $150 billion. Ergo, Sibelius says the government has an interest in food because "it has a lot to do with underlying health costs and [the] overall health of our nation. . . . The work around obesity and healthier, more nutritious eating" will be "an ongoing focus."</p>
<p>Do tell. Already the federal government has organized an Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children in "an effort to combat childhood obesity &ndash; the most serious health crisis facing today&rsquo;s youth."</p>
<p>The working group&mdash;comprising the FTC, the CDC, the FDA, and the Agriculture Department&mdash;already has proposed that food companies either (a) change their child-centered products to make them healthier or (b) lose the right to advertise them. The proposal is ostensibly voluntary. But then so is paying the Mafia protection money not to burn down your store.</p>
<p>In brief, the arc of food regulation seems to be following the arc of tobacco regulation: "voluntary" measures imposed "for the sake of the children" at first&mdash;followed by less voluntary, more comprehensive regulation undertaken for the sake of the common good, defined in both public-health terms and public-finance terms. What&rsquo;s more, the same assumption holds in both cases: The government should direct personal behavior that has any effect on other people. Since any behavior can be said to affect somebody else in some way, this is a recipe for a government of infinite scope.</p>
<p>Two days after Washington unveiled its new warning labels for cigarette packages, the <em>New England Journal of Medicine</em> published a study reporting that our food choices influence our weight more than exercise does. And potato chips pack on the pounds faster than any other food, including candy and desserts.</p>
<p>The logic of Washington&rsquo;s new cigarette warning labels holds that government should frighten people away from consumer goods that impose social costs. If we apply that consistently, then there is no reason federal regulators should not adorn bags of potato chips with garish photos of morbidly obese corpses, cutaways of clogged ateries, or glistening mounds of fatty tissue hacked out of cadavers.</p>
<p>If that doesn&rsquo;t slim America down enough, then perhaps Washington also will make everybody exercise for an hour a day. The idea sounds laughably implausible now. So what? As Secretary Sibelius says: "What may seem quite shocking at the beginning, people get used to quite quickly."</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jun/28/tdopin02-hinkle-want-to-see-a-corpse-on-a-can-of-p-ar-1136851/"> originally appeared</a> at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. <br /></em></p>1011862@http://www.reason.orgWed, 29 Jun 2011 16:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )The Unseen Effects of the Stimulushttp://www.reason.org/news/show/the-unseen-effects-of-the-stimulus
<p>According to an old joke, if you ask any two economists a question you will get back&nbsp;at least three opinions. As humor goes it&rsquo;s only mildly funny. But as a gloss on the discussion of the stimulus, it&rsquo;s terrifically on point.</p>
<p>Conservatives have slammed the American Recovery and&nbsp;Reinvestment Act of 2009&nbsp;(ARRA) as a grotesque waste of money, claiming it has not created any jobs. Liberals counter that, to the contrary, it has created or saved millions. For instance, the White House Council of Economic Advisers claims the stimulus deserves credit for perhaps as many as 3.6 million jobs created or saved. Writing Tuesday in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>, economist Alan Blinder says, regarding the claim that federal spending of more than $600 billion had zero effect, "that would be quite a trick."</p>
<p>He&rsquo;s right&mdash;at least in a very superficial sense. If you throw a rock that big into a pond it is bound to make some ripples. And it is categorically undeniable that the stimulus has funded positions which otherwise might not exist. State governments alone have increased payrolls by more than 40,000 since the recession began, generally using stimulus dollars to cut the paychecks. Just the other day a Republican lawmaker who had blasted Obama&rsquo;s "failed stimulus" attended a ceremony at a jobs placement center in Rome, New York. Stimulus money paid local youth to refurbish the building. Would they have been jobless otherwise? Impossible to say.</p>
<p>Still, more than 7 million jobs have disappeared from the economy since Barack Obama took office. He will be only the second president since Herbert Hoover to face re-election with fewer people working than when he started. (George W. Bush was the other.) So it seems fair to ask whether stimulus projects have increased the net number of jobs in the United States&mdash;or whether they simply have moved a diminishing number of jobs around.</p>
<p>Analogy time. Consider a robber who steals a purse containing $500, who then uses the money to buy himself a new TV. It is categorically undeniable that the theft has created a sale for the TV store. Conservatives who pretend the stimulus has not created any jobs whatsoever stand in the position of an observer trying to deny the TV has been sold.</p>
<p>Yet the liberal analysis lacks any recognition that the purse owner now has $500 less to spend on the laptop computer she was going to buy. The theft has generated one sale only by destroying another.</p>
<p>The first effect is easily seen. The second is not. But only the economically illiterate would conclude that just the first effect occurred, and that therefore the way to increase consumption is to encourage more purse-stealing. So in addition to looking at the number of jobs created or saved by the stimulus, shouldn&rsquo;t we also consider the number of jobs destroyed or forestalled?</p>
<p>That all might sound rather speculative. But it is no more speculative than the methods used by the administration&rsquo;s supporters. If you think they audited every single one of the jobs the stimulus ostensibly created to make sure each position can be traced back to the ARRA, then you have another think coming. Note how the various pro-stimulus studies estimate the program created somewhere between 800,000 and 4.2 million jobs. That&rsquo;s a huge variation. What accounts for it? Huge variations in the assumptions built into the studies.</p>
<p>For instance, the White House Council on Economic Advisers supports its claims by comparing real changes in GDP to projections&mdash;i.e., against educated guesses. Then it declares the stimulus deserves the credit for any difference. This is known as assuming the conclusion.</p>
<p>True, other sources&mdash;such as the Congressional Budget Office&mdash;also say the stimulus has created or saved jobs. Yet still more sources say the opposite. Last month economists Timothy Conley of the University of Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State University found that while the ARRA created or saved about 443,000 (mostly government) jobs, it destroyed or forestalled more than 1 million private-sector jobs&mdash;for a net loss of 595,000.</p>
<p>Liberals say that&rsquo;s bunk. "I don&rsquo;t find that very compelling," says a director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. (So there!) Conservatives retort that the pro-stimulus studies are programmed to produce a positive result, so they&rsquo;re no good either.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s one of the fun things about economics: You can always find a study to support your position. And the human tendency toward confirmation bias means you&rsquo;ll probably believe the studies that support your view, and dismiss the ones that don&rsquo;t.</p>
<p>Given how economists still vigorously debate the economic effects of the New Deal, it&rsquo;s not surprising that they would differ over the 2009 stimulus as well. So remember the old joke. You might ask for a definitive answer about the stimulus. The best you&rsquo;ll get back is conflicting opinions.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This column <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jun/24/tdopin02-hinkle-jobs-questions-provoke-a-stimulati-ar-1129462/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011840@http://www.reason.orgFri, 24 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )The Pre-K Graduating Class of 2011http://www.reason.org/news/show/the-pre-k-graduating-class-of-2011
<p><em>Today&rsquo;s column is guest-written by Endicott "Eddy" Saltenstall, dramaturge for the Bensonhurst Odeon and occasional theater critic for the Daily News.</em></p>
<p>RICHMOND, VA.&mdash;"All you can say for <em>Kiss Me, Kate</em>," wrote Brooks Atkinson, the immortal theater critic for <em>The New York Times</em>, "is that it is terribly enjoyable." Much the same goes for the graduation ceremony performed recently by the pupils and staff of the Bettye Ackerman Cobb Child Development Center ("the Bettye") at the Defense Supply Center off Jefferson Davis Highway in Richmond.</p>
<p>Productions such as these are not generally marked by their devotion to the avant-garde, and this was no exception. The set was, regrettably, conceptually uninspired&mdash;consisting chiefly of a cardboard "ABC" arch supported by pillars done up as Crayola crayons. The motif reminded an audience in little peril of forgetting that the occasion solemnized a transition from one phase of life, marked by potty-training and learning to sit criss-cross applesauce for story time, to a period of loftier pursuits: tying your own shoes, sounding out words, being the line leader, and other such stuff as dreams are made on.</p>
<p>After a polite welcome came the obligatory Pledge of Allegiance&mdash;spoken, unusually so for this sardonic age, without a trace of irony by the assembled audience of parents and family. (DSCR is a military installation, after all.) This was followed by a recital of the poem, "Do You Remember," by the graduates, in a declamatory style redolent of Olivier in his prime.</p>
<p>Yvette Bailey turned in a fine performance during her opening number, "Graduation Speech," delivered with a phrasing and cadence befitting her theme. The graduating pre-kindergarteners of 2011, she informed their parents and siblings, had learned "many priceless lessons" in their time at the Bettye. Among them: that life is "not just about learning but also . . . [about] love and friendship." And, she did not need to add, cookies and juice.</p>
<p>Tatanishia Armstrong&rsquo;s delivery of "Oh the Places You&rsquo;ll Go," with its wry observations leavened by tender optimism, revealed an impeccable command of timing and rhyme. All of this was, however, merely an amuse-bouche before the main course: the "Graduation Skit" (also titled, somewhat awkwardly, "Oh the Places You&rsquo;ll Go").</p>
<p>Inspired choreography began the number beyond the frame of the stage&mdash;a metaphorical nod to the importance of thinking outside the box, an imaginative skill whose ineluctable atrophy over the course of a K-12 education was hinted at, ever so obliquely, by the confinement of the rest of the number to a proscenium swallowed up by the existentially empty space around it. Ingmar Bergman would have been proud.</p>
<p>The occasionally undisciplined mugging and jumping about by the cast might have spoiled a production whose director had chosen to emphasize the darker dimensions of primary schooling. Here, it perfectly suited the mood of goofy looseness. And the earnestness of the young thespians&rsquo; performances, delivered with a joie de vivre that beguiled, largely overcame the interpretive inconsistencies and (it must be said) occasionally unrefined vocal technique. Liam A. possessed a charming authenticity as "Construction Worker"; Lauren B. was delightful as "Firefighter," and Danielle F., who has a bright future as a soubrette if she ever chooses to pursue one, belted out her lines with gusto as "Cat in the Hat." She really knows how to sell it.</p>
<p>Had there been a sourpuss in the audience, he or she might have lamented a certain lack of dramatic coherence, perhaps even a slight Godot-like tediousness as the presentation of stock characters&mdash;Pilot, Doctor, Police Officer, Nurse, etc.&mdash;wore on. But the unassuming charm and infectious enthusiasm of the cast would have won over any critic whose blood had not yet turned to ice. (There may be one or two of them left.)</p>
<p>The surprise of the afternoon was Alva P. (Will&rsquo;s dad), whose comic turn providing the "Parental Acknowledgment" suggests he may wish to try his hand at the boards, if (Heaven forbid) his legal practice ever goes belly-up.</p>
<p>All in all the vivid performances, Sondheimesque ingenuousness, sumptuous costumes, and festive atmosphere made "The Pre-K Graduating Class of 2011" a delight.</p>
<p>Cynics, of course, are fond of scoffing at occasions such as these. Graduation ceremonies&mdash;for pre-kindergarteners? You cannot be serious!</p>
<p>No. They cannot. Pre-schoolers have not yet learned what a serious place the world can be&mdash;which is why they remain, to borrow a phrase from Robert Brustein&rsquo;s <em>Letters to a Young Actor</em>, "the living embodiment of the audience&rsquo;s joys and fears."</p>
<p>Not to mention a bottomless hole for cookies and juice.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This column <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jun/21/tdopin02-theater-review-the-pre-k-graduating-class-ar-1121627/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011828@http://www.reason.orgTue, 21 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )A Suicide Pacthttp://www.reason.org/news/show/a-suicide-pact
<p>Earlier this week the <em>Fort Worth Star-Telegram</em> published one of the more astounding documents of our age. It was written by Joaquin "the Hatchet" Zapata&mdash;a notorious enforcer for the Zetas drug cartel, which controls much of the cocaine trade across the border of southern Texas.</p>
<p>Resembling nothing so much as an army field manual for mules and midlevel traffickers, the "Instrucciones" on shipping cocaine include a lengthy section on what to do if captured by U.S. authorities. Going into great detail about the legal rights of criminal defendants in America, it advises couriers to clam up, ask for an attorney, claim irregularities in the search (the exclusionary rule won't allow tainted evidence in court), and so on.</p>
<p>Naturally, right-wingers have jumped on the story. "The pendulum has swung too far in the narcoterrorists' favor," intoned GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty. Michele Bachmann demanded that Democrats join Republicans in rolling back any "technicalities" that work in the drug lords' favor.</p>
<p>As usual, Sarah Palin went further than most: "The Constitution of this great country of ours that I love so much is not some kind of suicide deal," she said (misquoting the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson), "and that is why I am urging our Congress today to repeal back the Fourth"&mdash;i.e., to draw a blue line through the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.</p>
<p>Palin is right. If drug dealers are exploiting our freedoms, then we no longer can afford them. Right?</p>
<p>Ha! Only kidding. None of that really happened. (Had you there for a second though, right?)</p>
<p>As you may have guessed by now, the foregoing is a rather ham-fisted parable. There are no Instrucciones, and Republicans have not been waving them about as proof that America should repeal the Bill of Rights.</p>
<p>Yet we are hearing just that sort of argument&mdash;in nature, if not in degree&mdash;from progressives right now.<br /> Several days ago Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for Al Qaeda, urged would-be jihadists to buy guns at gun shows: "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," he said. "You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?"</p>
<p>Within a couple of femtoseconds, progressive America began quoting Gadahn as proof that the U.S. needs to close the gun-show loophole. "There may never be a better spokesman" for doing so than Gadahn, opined <em>The Washington Post</em>&mdash;echoed by ThinkProgress, the <em>New York Daily News</em>, the Brady Campaign, and countless others.</p>
<p>This has to qualify as the Mount Everest of non sequiturs. The "loophole," as it is called, refers to the fact that private citizens who are not licensed gun dealers can sell their guns without conducting background checks&mdash;not only at gun shows, but anywhere. There are some sound arguments for closing the gun-show loophole, and there are some sound arguments for not closing it, and anyone who has followed the debate is familiar with most of them.</p>
<p>There are also some stupid arguments on both sides. Contending that the loophole should be closed because it might redound to the benefit of terrorists has to be one of the stupidest. Many of those making it simply cite Gadahn's words alone as sufficient proof&mdash;as though it were intuitively obvious that any policy potentially useful to Al Qaeda must be repealed at once.</p>
<p>If so, then Congress will be very busy. Because the so-called loophole is not the only policy potentially useful to Al Qaeda. So are a great many others. Among them: habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court reaffirmed in <em>Hamdi v. Rumsfeld</em>; the Fourth Amendment and its various progeny, such as the unique-to-America exclusionary rule; Miranda guarantees; the FISA court, which (some say) hamstrings counterintelligence efforts; and so on.</p>
<p>Indeed, during the Bush years you heard a lot of talk along just such lines: Many conservatives argued with perfectly straight faces that the blood of a hundred-thousand innocent people would be on the hands of anyone who let constitutional scruples get in the way of hunting terrorists down. Dissenting in <em>Boumediene v. Bush</em>, for example, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia lamented that upholding the habeas rights of alleged enemy combatants "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."</p>
<p>Well. After the High Court struck down a Chicago gun-control law last year, <em>The New York Times</em>&mdash;which praised recognizing the habeas rights of suspected terrorists&mdash;condemned recognizing the Second Amendment rights of American citizens. The arguments in the Chicago ruling, it lamented, "were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody."</p>
<p>Constraints upon government meant to protect the innocent sometimes end up protecting the guilty as well. That is one of the prices we pay for our liberties, and in that regard Justice Jackson was wrong. In some ways, the Constitution is a suicide pact: We accept the dangers of liberty in return for not living in a police state.</p>
<p>Or at least that is how it is supposed to work. People tend to want to carve out exceptions, though. So while liberals and conservatives don't agree on much, they do agree on this: American lives are far too precious to squander in defense of any item of the Bill of Rights cherished by the other side.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2011/jun/17/tdopin02-hinkle-us-cant-afford-bill-of-rights-anym-ar-1113723/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011819@http://www.reason.orgFri, 17 Jun 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Obama's War on the Rule of Lawhttp://www.reason.org/news/show/obamas-war-on-the-rule-of-law
<p>Evidence that the growth of government is a one-way ratchet continues to mount in Washington, where President Obama's pieties about abiding by the rule of law are eclipsing "one word: plastics" as a punch line.</p>
<p>The day after he was inaugurated, Obama promised that the rule of law would be a touchstone of his presidency. Apparently this was not a solemn vow but rather a sop to those liberals and progressives who had fumed over the Bush administration's traducing of the Constitution. For eight years the printing presses of the left had been smoking with the heat generated by articles such as "Bush's War on the Rule of Law" (<em>Harper's</em>), "Cheney's Law" (PBS) and others far too numerous to list.</p>
<p>The brief against Bush encompassed numerous charges: his use of signing statements to provide a pretext for disregarding parts of certain legislation; the indefinite detention without trial of suspected enemy combatants in Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay; the use of military tribunals; the Patriot Act; his administration's use of warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition; the use of national-security letters to comb through private information; and so on. Policies such as these "evoked the specter of tyranny," put America on the slippery slope to fascism, and were generally bad for children and other living things.</p>
<p>With Obama's election, the nation supposedly said goodbye to all that. The clouds broke, the fog lifted, and the sunlight of civil liberties once again bathed the nation in its golden hue. Except: Nothing like that happened. Instead, the Obama administration adopted every single one of the policies listed above. Some of the more principled progressives have voiced outrage and a sense of betrayal. The more partisan types have politely averted their gaze.<br /> But Obama has not confined his disdain for the rule of law to the Bush inheritance. He has carved out new realms for it.</p>
<p>Take Libya. The president started a war&mdash;or "kinetic military action"&mdash;without bothering to give Congress formal notification. The War Powers Resolution says a president may do something like that in exigent circumstances, but the action must be limited to 60 days. The administration has blithely let the deadline pass.</p>
<p>Last week, Virginia Democratic Sen. James Webb gave a stirring call to accountability: "Was our country under attack, or under the threat of imminent attack? Was a clearly vital national interest at stake? Were we invoking the inherent right of self-defense as outlined in the United Nations charter? Were we called upon by treaty commitments to come to the aid of an ally? Were we responding in kind to an attack on our forces elsewhere? &hellip; Were we rescuing Americans in distress? &hellip; No, we were not." The administration ignored Webb, too. Say what you will about the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, at least he got congressional assent before launching it.</p>
<p>But that is not all. Consider the many waivers the administration has granted&mdash;around 1,500, though it is hard to keep up when the precise number grows so fast&mdash;to ObamaCare. Many of them&mdash;unions and the AARP, which supported ObamaCare, now have waivers from it&mdash;bear a distinctly political tinge. None of them bears the color of legitimacy: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act contains no statutory provision for the granting of waivers to itself. Neither has the administration offered any rationale for the approval or denial of waivers, despite its claims to transparency, and FOIA requests, and lawsuits.</p>
<p>But that is not all, either: Remember how the administration gave precedence to the United Auto Workers' claims upon Chrysler over the claims of the company's secured creditors&mdash;a direct contravention of U.S. bankruptcy law. Or how it mau-maued BP into creating a government-administered compensation fund in advance of any judgments against it. Or its Orwellian reinterpretation of labor law to stop Boeing from moving a plant from Washington state to South Carolina.</p>
<p>Critics on the right accuse the administration of socialism, but its economic approach more closely resembles fascism properly understood&mdash;in which the means of production are privately owned but business decisions are centrally made through a policy of dirigisme. Socialism and fascism are incendiary words, tossed about by people who are upset that they have not gotten their way. That does not render them entirely inapplicable.</p>
<p>Rulebooks, of course, are for losers. Nobody winning a big hand at poker demands that everyone stop to make sure they're playing according to Hoyle. Hence when Bush won the White House, Democrats rediscovered their constitutional scruples; with Obama in office, Republicans have rediscovered theirs. A pity that so many care about the rules only when they're in no position to enforce them.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jun/14/tdopin02-presidency-grows-even-more-imperial-ar-1106046/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011806@http://www.reason.orgTue, 14 Jun 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Tolerance for Me But Not for Theehttp://www.reason.org/news/show/tolerance-for-me-but-not-for-thee
<p>Gay-rights organizations have been quick to defend the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank after it came under attack for hoisting a gay-pride flag on a pole directly beneath the American flag. The Fed did so at the request of, and to show support for, its gay, lesbian, and transgender employees.</p>
<p>Republican Del. Bob Marshall, the conservative Family Foundation, and others have blasted the Fed for flying the gay-pride flag. James Parrish, the executive director of Equality Virginia, says the Fed is "a private business and should be able to make its own personnel and corporate policy decisions without Bob Marshall's guidance or the Family Foundation's approval."</p>
<p>It's nice to see a gay-rights group take that position. The homosexual community has not always been so open-minded.</p>
<p>A little over a decade ago, gay-rights groups attacked the Boy Scouts of America for refusing to let James Dale, a gay man, become a Scoutmaster. Some argued that this violated a New Jersey law barring discrimination in public accommodations. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Scouts, as a private organization, had a right to "expressive association": They could not be forced to accept as members people who did not share their fundamental values.<br /> In that case, groups such as the Lambda Legal Defense Fund and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force argued strenuously that the Boy Scouts had no business keeping Dale out&mdash;just as social conservatives, who now denounce the Fed for flying the gay-pride flag, stood up for the right of the Scouts to exclude gays.</p>
<p>Although the positions look hypocritical, they have a certain convenient logic: Gay-rights groups will support whatever they deem good for the cause of gay rights, and religious conservatives will oppose the same, and each will take whatever position on any other issue best serves that end at any given moment. There's a lot of that going around.</p>
<p>Granted, all analogies are inexact. Social conservatives are not suing the Federal Reserve. They recognize that the private institution has the right to fly any flag it wants. What's more, the Scout case did involve a New Jersey statute, which gave gay-rights groups some legal ground on which to stand. Nevertheless, the guiding principles on each side lack internal consistency.</p>
<p>Since then, other cases about the freedom of association have arisen. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in one concerning the Christian Legal Society at the Hastings College of Law in California&mdash;a public institution. The CLS allowed gays and lesbians to join but not to serve as officers. Hastings therefore declined to accept the legal society as a registered student group, thereby denying it funding. In that case, the Supreme Court split 5-4 in favor of the school.</p>
<p>Set alongside the Scouting decision, the Hastings case tells private groups: You can discriminate if you wish&mdash;but the public is not obliged to subsidize your discrimination. That makes sense.</p>
<p>Now the issues raised by the Boy Scout case have come full circle. A gay softball group has been taken to court in Seattle over its policy limiting the number of straight players. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour ruled last week that the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance has the same right as the Boy Scouts do to set its membership rules. "It would be difficult for the NAGAAA to effectively emphasize a vision of the gay lifestyle" if it were "prohibited from maintaining a gay identity" by excluding straight people, the judge wrote.</p>
<p>Back when the Scout case was being litigated, a small number of homosexuals could see this coming. Charlottesville resident Richard Sincere, the leader of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty, wrote at the time that "freedom of association is the key" to striking down anti-homosexual laws&mdash;which are based on the presumption that when any two gay people get together, straight people should have a say in what they do next. But straight people shouldn't, any more than homosexuals should be able to interfere in the friendships and relationships of heteros.</p>
<p>What both gay-rights and religious-conservative groups seem to have yet to realize is that you cannot claim a right for your friends but deny it to your enemies. If gay groups want the right to exclude straight people, then straight groups must have the right to exclude gays, and vice versa. Picking our own friends is, thus far, one of the least trampled of our liberties&mdash;and it ought to stay that way.</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jun/10/TDOPIN02-hinkle-gays-conservatives-cant-keep-their-ar-1097785/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. <br /></em></p>1011798@http://www.reason.orgFri, 10 Jun 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )Declare Defeat and Go Homehttp://www.reason.org/news/show/declare-defeat-and-go-home
<p>"The war on drugs has failed," declared the editors of <em>National Review</em> in 1996, back when the nation&rsquo;s foremost conservative periodical promoted ideas more intellectually rigorous than cheerleading for the Republican Party. "It is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction. . . .It is wasting our resources, and . . . it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We [here at <em>NR</em>] all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far."</p>
<p>In the decade and a half since then, the federal government has shelled out more than $100 billion&mdash;vastly more, by some estimates&mdash;fighting the scourge of illegal drugs. How&rsquo;s that workin&rsquo; out? Not too good! Last Thursday the Global Commission on Drug Policy, an international panel that included such sober souls as former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, said the U.S.-led war on drugs "has failed."</p>
<p>It has not simply failed. It has failed miserably. Increasing federal expenditures have risen hand-in-hand with increasing drug use. From 2002 to 2009, national drug-control funding rose from $10.8 billion a year to $15 billion&mdash;a 39 percent increase. Yet as <em>The Chicago Tribune</em>&rsquo;s Steve Chapman noted last October, roughly 22 million Americans used illegal drugs in 2009. That represents a 9 percent increase over the year before and the highest rate since 2002.</p>
<p>People recovering from drug and alcohol addiction are fond of defining insanity as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. By that standard, American policy toward mind-altering substances looks awfully familiar. The nation tried Prohibition once, with alcohol. Result: abject failure, rampant organized crime, and little lasting effect on consumption or addiction. In fact, Prohibition actually encouraged the use of harder spirits, since bootleggers could smuggle more alcohol in a car full of liquor than a car full of beer.</p>
<p>Alcohol prohibition lasted only a few years. The war on drugs has lasted for decades, and for the most part has consisted of only one solution, over and over: criminalization and imprisonment. Nearly 2 million people are arrested each year for drug offenses and a half-million are currently serving time on drug charges. Yet when stiffer sentences fail to produce the desired results, drug prohibitionists insist the penalties just aren&rsquo;t harsh enough. They resemble the carpenter who complained that he had cut a board three times and it was still too short.</p>
<p>Trying to solve the problem of addiction through incarceration is like trying to get rid of a cockroach infestation by turning on the lights. The temporary solution doesn&rsquo;t address the underlying problem, which requires treatment. Sometimes locking a user up doesn&rsquo;t even interrupt his using. Do a Google search on smuggling drugs into prison for an education on that front. If prohibition can&rsquo;t keep narcotics out of prison cells, it won&rsquo;t keep them out of&nbsp;playgrounds and office parks.</p>
<p>Decriminalization and treatment&mdash;the approach suggested by the international panel&mdash;differs from outright legalization, which is often portrayed as heartless indifference to the ravages that addiction can inflict. It is not that, or at least not only that. The moral case for legalization stems from a reverence for individual autonomy&mdash;the notion that each of us owns his own body, and none of us has the right to tell another what to do with it. Family and friends might plead with someone to change his ways, but the government has no moral authority to make him.</p>
<p>Conservatives, who generally abhor government paternalism and consider freedom an unalloyed good, do not look nimble when they clumsily pirouette from denouncing ObamaCare and the food police to embracing life sentences for pot smokers.</p>
<p>Taken to its logical extreme, the autonomy argument can support not only legalizing drugs but also legalizing prostitution, selling your organs, and abolishing the minimum wage. On the other hand, taken to its logical extreme the moral assumption embedded in drug prohibition also leads to unpopular conclusions. If the government can stop you from using meth because it harms your health and reduces your usefulness to the community, then by the same token it can stop you from other unhealthful behavior for the same reason. Already, Arizona is proposing a $50 surcharge on Medicaid recipients who smoke or weigh too much. Maricopa County is charging smokers $450 more for health insurance&mdash;and taking a swab to test for nicotine. How long before the common-good rationale justifies mandatory exercise for everyone?</p>
<p>We don&rsquo;t have to chase every one of those philosophical digressions down a rabbit hole to recognize the obvious: America is spending tens of billions of dollars a year putting drug users and sellers in prison, without putting much of a dent in drug consumption. The drug war has failed, and its advocates&rsquo; best thinking got us here. Isn&rsquo;t it time they tried something else?</p>
<p><em>A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>. This article <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/jun/07/tdopin02-hinkle-prohibition-has-failed-lets-try-so-ar-1089527/"> originally appeared</a> at the</em> Richmond Times-Dispatch<em>.</em></p>1011754@http://www.reason.orgTue, 07 Jun 2011 10:30:00 EDTinfo@reason.org (A. Barton Hinkle )